Читать книгу Rosie Thomas 3-Book Collection: Moon Island, Sunrise, Follies - Rosie Thomas - Страница 20

There was not much Leonie could do to make the cottage living-room look welcoming. The chairs on either side of a brown shagpile rug were mismatched and hollow-seated, and the dim overhead bulb was dimmed still further by being encased in a cylindrical green shade. She put the jug of wine in the refrigerator, which looked as if it had stood in the same spot on the dented kitchen tiles for the past thirty years. She was humming as she went out into the dusk and picked some spikes of goldenrod from the clump beside the cottage door and arranged the flowers in a chipped earthenware jug from one of the cupboards. A pair of thick, velvety moths swirled through the open door and began a competitive dance around the lampshade. The silence of the woodland clearing and the damp pungency of the evening air soothed Leonie’s spirit.

It was after nine o’clock when she heard the car coming up the track. She stood framed in the doorway and the headlamps swept over her before John extinguished them. A moment later he came in, bringing the outside world into the bleak room. He put paperback novels and a liquor store brown bag on the scarred coffee table.

‘Thank you,’ Leonie said. It was different to see him away from the beach. To be alone together in these bare, banal surroundings was intimate, but at the same time they had slipped out of the beginnings of easiness with one another and back into a kind of anxious formality.

‘Shall I?’ He gestured at the wine he had brought.

‘I’ve got some chilled.’ She poured it into ugly glasses and handed one to John.

He was looking at the chairs and the rug, and in the quietness the moths batted against the lampshade. ‘What are you doing in this place?’ he asked in clear bewilderment.

She looked at him before answering, trying to fit together the impression she had built of him with the reality of this big, greying man, who had brought awkwardness into her cottage. At the same time she caught a glimpse of her own desperation, which now seemed to fade like a shadow behind her. Had it only taken the day’s one conclusive step to dispel it? ‘I’m thinking. Marshalling myself, I suppose.’

She told him about stopping in Haselboro and the connections that had brought her to rest here.

‘It’s a pretty horrible little place.’

‘Is it?’ She was genuinely surprised at his vehemence. It was the bareness and simplicity of the cottage that had appealed to her; a place for people without much money to spare, which was still a shelter and hiding-place in the woods. ‘Well, whatever. I suppose you’re right.’

‘How long will you stay?’

The way he wanted to impose limits and horizons surprised her too. ‘I don’t know. Maybe I’ll take some unpaid leave from my job and stay on for a while. Or perhaps I’ll just go back to Boston in a couple of days or a week and do what has to be done.’

‘Have you left him?’

She nodded her head. That much at least was certain. ‘Yes.’

‘Does he know?’

‘I think even Tom will probably have registered my absence by this time.’

‘I meant, does he think you’ve just flounced out and will come sliding back home in a day or so?’

‘Maybe. But I made quite an exit. I threw Marian’s shells over the porch.’ He didn’t know why she was laughing, she realised. ‘I’m not going back. Whatever happens from tonight onwards, I’m never going back to live with Tom.’

She picked up the wine jug and tilted it towards John’s glass but he half covered it with the palm of his hand. Leonie refilled her own glass instead and drank from it. ‘I’m glad to have something to read.’

‘I didn’t know what else I could bring you. If I had known …’ He couldn’t stop himself taking another look around the confines of the room.

‘I don’t need anything else.’

‘No. It seems extraordinary but I don’t believe you do.’

They smiled at each other then, the first time since his arrival.

‘I can even offer you dinner, of a kind.’

On the table in the kitchen Leonie laid out the cheese and fruit she had bought from Roger’s mother, and they sat down facing each other. In both of their minds was the temporary picture of domesticity they made together, and the questions and possibilities that spread out from it now into an unreadable future, like roots burrowing under the ground. Leonie found she was closing out the questions, deliberately pinching off the growths. This distance had been far enough to come for one day.

She leaned across the table instead, pouring the wine, making John talk as they ate. She wanted to listen to him and he obligingly answered the need, first with generalities, then by answering her questions with more telling details about his life and his children. It seemed he lived a self-contained existence now, even though he liked the company of women. Leonie warmed to his independence and to the streak of resilience that she understood was hidden by his pliant exterior. He told her about May not wanting him to come out to Haselboro.

‘I can understand why,’ Leonie said. ‘She wouldn’t want to share you, would she?’

There was a small silence. Then John covered her hand with his. Leonie remembered their lunch at Sandy’s, and the plate of cherries and the moment when she knew she didn’t love her husband any longer. This was just as much a crossing place, she realised, although she didn’t yet know quite what she should make of it.

‘Is it a question of sharing me?’ he asked her.

She gazed down at their joined hands, knowing that he deserved at least an attempt at an answer. And at the same time there was the old shadow of her despair slipping out of the periphery of her vision and disappearing. The way ahead looked suddenly bright and bare. ‘Maybe not yet.’

‘I see.’

They had finished eating. Leonie pushed back her chair and went around the table to take hold of him. ‘Come and lie down with me.’

He stood up but made no other move. A space yawned between them. ‘What does that mean?’

‘I know it’s a confusing message. It means I want to hold you and be close to you.’

‘We can try it.’

The bed had a wooden head and footboard, and a thin green cotton cover. The centre of the mattress seemed to contain the impression of a single large body. They were both smiling at the incongruity of it all as they lay down in one another’s arms. John put his mouth against her hair and she felt the warmth of his breath on her scalp when he whispered, ‘I couldn’t have dreamt of a more romantic setting.’

‘I thought not.’

They hugged the bubble of laughter between them and Leonie thought dizzily, Today I left my husband. Tomorrow I don’t know what will happen. To be happy was a sensation she had almost forgotten, but for all its inappropriateness it was what she did feel.

The bedroom window was a black eye staring at them. Leonie sat suddenly upright and swung out of bed to pull the dingy curtain across and block out the night. When she lay down again John held her and stroked her hair, and her neck beneath the veil of it. The comfort was all-enveloping. Leonie rested her head, letting her bones slowly sink into stillness. His warmth and the smell of him were benign, his breathing a steady rhythm against her heart. She sighed with satisfaction. ‘That is so good.’

‘Yes.’ A movement of his shoulder settled her face closer to his.

‘Can we just lie like this?’

‘Of course.’

The pure silence from beyond the cottage filled the dingy rooms and seemed to cleanse them. Leonie realised that the comfort it gave her was in the absence of the sea’s monotonous mumbling.

They lay in one another’s arms without the need for talk. The awkwardness of John’s arrival had all gone and the minutes slipped past them without being marked or counted. Leonie thought about the last time they had held each other, back in the Captain’s House, before the shock waves of shattering glass cut out the sound of the sea. Dreamily she envisaged sex as a hurtling meteorite, a nugget of inexplicable rock red-hot from its passage through the atmosphere between them. It was separate from each of them and belonged to neither, but it would gouge a crater far bigger than itself wherever it plunged to rest. Whereas this gender intimacy suffused with silence was infinite. It was space itself.

Physical desire had left her. Sex had become associated with her inability to conceive and had been one of the garments that clothed her unhappiness. She had been so unhappy the other night. And without warning May’s face upturned from her bleeding hand came back to her, with the same mute but fully legible lines of misery cut into it.

Is it a question of sharing me? John had asked.

Maybe not yet.

He should go home first to his children. It was already very late.

John’s eyes were open, studying her face. Leonie shifted her position and he misread her intention. He found her mouth with his and busily kissed her. The kiss was half answered, then it shrivelled between them.

‘Is this all wrong?’ he asked. ‘If you want me to walk away you must tell me and I’ll do it. I know how that’s done – it’s moving in the other direction I’ve forgotten about. Only I don’t want to be an instrument in the break-up of your marriage and I won’t offer you myself in exchange for Tom because in time you’ll come to resent the terms of the exchange even if they seem favourable now.’

‘So what do you want?’

‘I would like – yeah, I’d like to haul you off and make you mine in a cabin in the woods. A better one than this. I’d cut wood and draw water for you. Shoot bears, spear fish. Forget about business mail and art history books. How does that sound?’

‘Short or long term?’

‘Uh, long. Whatever that means,’ he corrected himself. ‘You know what the bear and fish world can be like.’

Leonie smiled. His deliberate conjuring of a fantasy world made his intentions as opaque as hers. And that was perfectly fair, she thought. Lightly she asked, ‘Can I get back to you?’

He took her face between his hands. ‘Is that what we’re saying? Not now, but maybe some time?’

‘Yes. That’s what I’m saying, at least.’

The creases at the corners of his eyes deepened. ‘I think that’s the right answer.’

He kissed her again. Then he unwrapped his arms and stood up, easing his shoulders and back, his height making him seem oversized in the cramped bedroom. Leonie wished for a moment that she had chosen now rather than some time. Instead she followed him out into the night, said goodbye and watched until the receding lights of the car had been swallowed up by the woodland.

When she was alone once more she experimentally turned off all the lights in the cabin. The instant darkness made flowers of retinal colour explode within her eyelids, but there was no menace in the star-shapes nor any threat in the night’s mossy silence.

In the Captain’s House after Ivy had gone May forced herself to process through the rooms, throwing open the doors and staring in at the unmoving shapes of chairs and tables. There was nothing here, nothing to be afraid of, but still she shivered with currents of fear. Being alone made her think of Doone and the pale face of the island woman.

When she came back again into the downstairs room she pressed her face against the window with its broken pane and tried to see into the night. Then it came to her that her outline would be thrown up in sharp relief against the yellow lamplight and that all the house would be punctured with a collage of window squares. Quickly she retreated and flicked the wall switches that brought the dark inside.

When her eyes accommodated themselves she could see clearly enough to move around. She switched on the television. Immediately nodding heads with wide mouths filled the screen, and a babble of laughter and applause assaulted her ears. She found the remote control and aimed it at the noise so that it faded at once into silence, although her ears still rang with it. For a minute or two she gazed uncomprehendingly at the overanimated faces. The colour balance was off and the skins were greenish, the lips orange and puckered like weird specimens of marine life.

Oily waves of disgust heaved beneath May’s breastbone.

Colour bled out from the screen and lent the darkness an eerie glow.

She pointed the remote like a weapon again and the set clicked off. Now the refrigerator started into life with a low hum. Her ears were painfully over-attuned to the small noises of the house. There were the creaks of wooden boards and a tiny clinking, which might have been two pieces of crockery vibrating in harmony with the refrigerator motor.

May slipped to the stairs and crept upwards, setting her feet silently on each tread. The house was all in darkness now. She receded into her room and set the door open by the smallest crack, not wanting to shut herself in. At first there was no differential in the blacknesses contained by the hair’s breadth of space looking out into the hallway and within the room itself. But as she sat on her bed with her spine drawn rigid she was able gradually to pick out the chest that held her clothes and the bookshelves where Doone’s book lay in its place.

She reached out for it and held it. The red binding of the spine was peeling a little at one corner.

She knew by heart the last words Doone had written. She had been unable to forget them, ever since she had unlocked them with the help of Hannah Fennymore’s whaling story.

I feel so sick with myself and the world.

I love him, every bone in me loves him, and I will never have him.

I want to die. It would be best for me to die.

The sea fretted and whispered beneath the window. In May’s sharpened hearing the murmur grew louder and louder, swelling as if her head were empty except for the pearly whorls of a giant shell. Her legs were unsteady when she stood up and the floor dipped beneath her like the deck of a ship under way. It was a long way to the window, much further than the thirteen steps she knew it to be.

She looked out at the island. It was a black hump rising out of the silvery water but tonight there were lights on the crescent beach. There was a reddish glow near the waterline, a driftwood fire that would be sending bright sparks up into the salt air. There were smaller, dancing pinpoints round about that looked like torches. It was Ivy and Lucas and the others, Gail and Kevin and Joel and the rest of the cousins, and some of the kids from Pittsharbor. They had all gone out to the island and they were having a party.

May could hear their voices and meaningless laughter rising and falling within the sea-washed shell of her head. ‘Hey, Kevin. Just chill, willya? This grass is like, amazing. Whoo, unreal.’

And there was Lucas, with Ivy, their arms forgivingly wound around each other. Even now the physical imprint of him seemed burnt into May’s skin, and she shivered with the confusion of absence and jealousy.

I love him, every bone in me loves him.

The impoverished and eloquent second-hand words of Doone’s lament twined and echoed with the other voices.

Yet it wasn’t Lucas Doone had loved so tragically.

I’m not her, May whispered to herself – I don’t, I don’t have to submerge myself like Doone did – if only the sea were not so loud and the house so silent and shadowed. Lucas was beautiful but he was ordinary, too, a chip of reality; the sweaty scent of him stayed in the back of her throat and she knew for certain that he was unconnected with any of this mess of darkness and water.

But if Lucas had never been Doone’s fatal love, then who was it whose name she could never write even in her private diary?

Gently May laid the red-and-black book back in its place on the shelf.

She was standing at the window looking across the silver sheet of water towards the island when she heard the first soft footstep crossing the downstairs room. The old floor-boards creaked under an invisible weight. There was another step and then another, measured and unhurried. But no one had come into the house; she would have heard Ivy come in through the porch doors and John’s car hadn’t pulled up at the front of the house. The footsteps stopped and their hesitation froze her heart so that its beat faltered.

Something was coming for her, searching for her.

A liquid wash of terror poured through May. She couldn’t allow herself to be trapped here in Doone’s bedroom. Sometimes the door wouldn’t open, as though an invisible shoulder held it tight, but it was open by a hair’s breadth now, just as she had left it. She forced herself into motion, although fear locked her limbs. Her mouth dried with wordless gratitude for being barefoot as she slipped out of the room. The house itself had become a listening shell, the silence noisy with whispers and sighs. May hung for an instant in the black hallway, motionless as a suit of clothes in a wardrobe, all her being trying to focus on what the threat might be. There was someone near, she could feel it in the tiny currents that electrified her skin.

As silently as a moving shadow she flitted across the stairhead. She could see no one in the narrow segment of the room visible at the foot.

John’s bedroom door stood wide open. She melted into the blackness behind it and with her chest bursting and blood hammering in her head took the first breath since the footsteps had halted. They were moving again now. They came unhurriedly across the room to the foot of the stairs.

May retreated step by step until her knees came into contact with the edge of her father’s bed. The steps advancing up the stairs now sounded as loud as a drumbeat. There was a shaft of light, lapping up the walls outside and sending a moving slice of visibility around the angle of the open door and across a wedge of floor. She stared in mute horror at the pattern revealed in the rug, then like a leaf falling she crumpled sideways into the bedcovers. She drew her knees up to her chest and pulled a blanket over her head. Her eyes squeezed shut and her breath stopped in her chest as she lay and waited to be found.

The bedclothes next to her face smelled of her father’s body. When she was little she used to run into her parents’ bedroom and climb into the warm hollow between them. She remembered that her father’s smell was always strong but good, like hay or sawn wood. It came back to her now, and the memory of safety and security with it like a glimpse of a lost world.

The footsteps passed into Doone’s bedroom and the light swept away with them.

At the back of the house where May lay huddled the sound of the sea was muffled. The tiny noises that reached her from across the hallway were much louder. She heard a soft swish like clothing brushing against furniture and the bump of small objects being moved around. That these sounds were audible and yet inexplicable made fear tighten its tourniquet grip on her. She was locked into immobility, but she could feel the bubbles of a scream or a sob forcing their way up into her throat. She closed her eyes tighter and bit the inside of her mouth to contain it.

Suddenly there was a snap. A second later the steps were coming back again, much louder and firmer.

It would find her now, whatever it was.

She hunched and waited. But the steps passed her father’s door and trod down the stairs. They went across the living-room beneath, then she couldn’t hear them any more, nor anything else except the endless voice of the sea.

She had no idea how long she lay in the same position. It was a long time, because when she did try to move hot wires of pain shot through her joints. She dared to push back the blanket and lifted her head to look around. There was nothing, except the darkened room.

After some more long minutes she found the courage to roll sideways and put her feet to the floor. They were numb with cold and cramp in her legs almost made her stumble. May crept across to Doone’s bedroom and with a brave sweep of her hand she clicked on the light. The brightness of it burned her eyes, but even so she saw at once that the diary was missing from its place.

A cold hand touched the back of her neck. She spun round, gasping, but there was nothing there.

From the window May saw that there were lights still moving on Moon Island. She could run out of this house with its echoes and footfalls, and simply row across to find the others. Kevin and Joel, mumbling about how stoned they were. Gail, and Lucas and Ivy. The moment she thought of it she was overcome by a longing to get to Ivy. Bold, sarcastic Ivy would pinch out this fear for her like an ant between her silver fingernails. To go to Ivy, that was what she must do.

She ran down the stairs, her breath snicking in her chest. The room was empty, just as she had left it, the television remote dropped on the counter. She threw open the porch door and ran across the strip of garden to the beach steps. Across the shingle she ran faster, even though the stones hurt her bare feet. A rowing dinghy, one of the Beams’ that they used to reach the sailboat at high water, was moored to a little white buoy. The oars were revealed neatly shipped inside when she tore back the tarpaulin cover.

May undid the mooring line and at a run pushed the dinghy away from the beach. She threw herself over the side and fell into the bottom. She was soaked to the waist, but hardly even noticed it. Her sister, she must get to her sister. A mixture of love and anticipatory relief made her sob, and there were tears on her cheeks as she fitted the lightweight oars and began to row. The boat skimmed over the flat water. The moon was up and the wake lapped behind the transom like molten pewter.

May looked back over her shoulder only once to check her progress towards the island. Then the prow of the boat ran into the beach with a soft judder and she let her head fall forward for one second in relief. Sweat from the effort of rowing so hard almost blinded her. She stumbled out of the boat and made the motion of pulling it further up into the sand. She realised then that there were no other boats beached anywhere along the glimmering crescent. The houses across on the bluff looked dark and gaunt. May had no idea what time it was.

On the beach she found the ashes of the bonfire. There were no embers left glowing at the heart of it but when she knelt down to touch it she felt the residue of heat. Glancing up from where she knelt she saw the lights again. They had receded into the trees. There was a pale glow, which wavered between the black boles of the spruces. ‘Ivy?’ she called out.

Her voice sounded weak and flat, and the salt-heavy air damped it into nothing. The tiny ripples breaking a yard away made an endless whisper. ‘Ivy?’

There was no answer. May thought suddenly of Doone’s sailboat gliding over the bay and the green skin of water closing over her body. The sea at her back seemed to pull at her, enticing her back to its innocent lacy edge and into the chilly beaten-silver oblivion beyond. Her soaking clothes were clammy against her legs.

May began to run. She pounded up the slope of sand away from the sea and over the lip of earth, where vegetation matted the margins of the beach. She stumbled across roots and brambles until she reached the black canopy of trees, then threw herself in among them. The light above and ahead tantalised her; it was further away, growing fainter. ‘Ivy,’ she screamed. ‘Wait for me.’

All around her was the shiver and rustle of woodland. She began to run again, clawing her way up the slope. Once the ground seemed to give way beneath her and she looked down into the hollow where she had once seen Lucas and Ivy together. She remembered the pallor of Ivy’s skin.

She was crying and gasping for breath as she scrambled on upwards. She had all but forgotten that there was no reason for her climb; all she could think of was setting a distance between herself and the cold beckoning of the sea. Ivy must be here somewhere. She had to reach her.

After another hundred yards, with her lungs threatening to burst inside her, May realised that she was plunging downhill. She must have crested the spine of the island and now she was running out of control towards the open sea. She crashed to a stop and looked around wildly, her breath as loud as tidal surges in her ears.

Over her head a huge oak tree spread its branches like veins against the sky. They seemed to toss with the wind, although it was a still night. May put her hands up to her hair and found it wet. Slick strands of it clung to her skull and her neck, and there was salt in her mouth and on her tongue.

She took one step backwards and another, away from the great tree. The melancholy and doom that hung about it reached out to clutch at her, as strong as gripping hands. Weakly she staggered another few yards. Ivy wasn’t here; she couldn’t be anywhere near this place.

There was a darker mass ahead of her, more solid than the woven trees and branches. A sweet-sharp smell of crushed juniper caught in her nostrils and wrist-thick tree roots caught her foot. The island was alive with footsteps, with the swish of bodies steadily advancing on her through the foliage. She froze into stillness, knowing that there was nowhere to run, her ears filling with the pin-sharp signals of threat as they closed in on her.

Her innards loosened as she shrank backwards, one step.

It was a fine house that he had built for himself, she saw that immediately she began the walk towards it over the headland. Robert Hanner had always liked the best and it had never been his habit to forgo what he wanted or imagined to be his due.

The house was positioned on a vantage point that gave a commanding view of the serene bay and its islands, but it was set somewhat at an angle so that the occupants might not always have to gaze directly at the restless waves. After the months she had spent aboard the Dolphin, more than three years ago now but still present in her mind and in her dreams, Sarah fully understood the reasons why Robert might not always wish to have the sea before his eyes.

There was a grey curl of smoke rising from one of the chimneys. As Sarah drew slowly closer the sturdy clapboard walls and the secure shingle of the roof told her this was a safe haven for the people within. There were dainty lace curtains looped at the lower windows and a tidy pile of split logs was stored under a lean-to at the side.

After her long search and the journey that had led her here she was in no great hurry nor, knowing what she now knew, was there any longer the pounding of hope and anticipation in her heart. Instead there was a bitter determination to finish the course she had begun and to have done with it at last. She slipped a hand into the deep pocket at her side and closed her fingers around the smooth handle of the knife. She had carried the weapon about with her for so long that it felt like her trusted companion, the only certain ally she could claim in the world.

When she reached the shelter of a clump of bushes Sarah sank down on a rock so that she was hidden from the windows of the house. She rested for a moment, drawing her loose coat around her, although the fading afternoon had not yet turned cool.

It seemed that Robert had chosen one of the sweetest spots imaginable to make his own. As it sank between bars of cloud the sun glittered on the sea and silvered the lines of breakers. The island in the bay’s shelter was a handsome crescent of rock and sand crowned with a proud ridge of dark pointed firs, and on this distant beach another fringe of smaller waves was breaking. The light was as clear as spring water, and the air was fresh with salt and the scent of thyme and juniper.

‘The Captain’s House,’ the woman at the lodging house in Pittsharbor had called it, although Sarah knew well enough that Robert Hanner was no retired sea-captain. Wherever and from whom his money had been stolen or extorted, it was not aboard a whaling ship, neither in the captain’s cabin nor the forecastle. Robert had completed only one thirteen-month voyage aboard the whaler out of Nantucket before signing himself off. Once she herself had made the long voyage home from South America, Sarah’s investigations at the shipping agents had revealed that much, if little else, about her one-time lover who was now her quarry.

After that there had been a long, weary time, which had yielded no information as to his whereabouts, and Sarah had come to understand that her task was beyond daunting. Robert Hanner had simply left Nantucket and vanished into the great continent of America, taking his name and his history, and Sarah Corder’s life and hopes with him.

Once the small notoriety surrounding the return of the young woman who had disguised herself as a sailor had died down, Sarah devoted herself to becoming invisible. It was not a difficult achievement. While her little store of money lasted she travelled the Massachusetts seaboard, staying wherever she could find a cheap bed, then moving on and always searching. Robert was a New Englander. Her belief and most fervent hope was that after all he would not have strayed too far from the familiar horizons of home. She scanned every face she passed in every street, eavesdropped on every conversation she could approach, read all the columns in each local newspaper. There was never any trace of him.

When her money was used up Sarah found employment as a scullery maid in the house of a Boston merchant. She slept in a curtained cubbyhole off the cavernous basement kitchen, and nursed her implacable resolve through the hard and monotonous days like a tender mother with a baby. Her meagre wages and few lonely hours off were all spent in searching the nameless crowds for Robert. When Boston yielded nothing of him she moved again, with a reference grudgingly supplied by the mistress of the house, to Portland and after a few months more to Rockport on Penobscot Bay. She allowed her instincts to guide her because she had no other inspiration. The daily sight of the sea was a reminder of what she had suffered aboard the Dolphin and served to firm her intentions, if any such reinforcement were necessary. Sarah had become a grim and melancholy version of the lost young woman to whom Matthias Plant had been drawn so tenderly.

At Rockport she found Robert Hanner. Or rather she stumbled across his name and whereabouts.

One evening, after she had completed her work, she was sitting beside the kitchen range with her weekly diet of the local newspapers. The light was dim and she hunched forward in her chair, turning the smudged columns of newsprint, frowning in concentration as she read. Turning to the Announcements section of the Advertiser of Eastern Maine the name she had sought for so long suddenly leapt out at her.

At Pittsharbor on 22 July,

to Robert and Charlotte Hanner,

the gift of a healthy daughter.

Sarah let the paper fall into her lap and stared at the fire within its iron cage. She saw her handsome lover in the red heart of it as clearly as on the day he had abandoned her. Robert had not even changed his name, so he did not believe he had anything to fear. There would be no forcing him to marry her; he was already married and a father.

The fire crimsoned one side of Sarah’s impassive face. The other cheek was as pale and cold as marble.

Within two days she had left the Rockport house and begun the journey north-eastwards to the fishing village of Pittsharbor. Part of the way she travelled with a local carrier who was transporting ironmongery for delivery to general storekeepers along the route. There were certain favours he required of her in return and these Sarah performed mechanically, as if her mind and heart were entirely disconnected from her body. The last fifteen miles she walked.

Two miles short of her destination she came to a rough inn and lodging house frequented by carriers and drovers, and the salesmen who brought commodities of all kinds to the remote communities of the area. Caring nothing for the speculative glances and bold invitations of her fellow guests, she took a room for the night and stayed within it until the middle of the following afternoon. If any one of the other travellers had been able to look in on her they would have seen her sitting motionless on the frowsy bed, hour after hour, her head bent in thought.

In the afternoon of the next day she emerged.

She called on the innkeeper’s wife for some bread and cheese, and ate a little of the food when it was brought to her. She also drank a glass of rum and water. The woman of the house was a coarse creature who showed a ready tendency to talk once Sarah had explained that she was searching for a distant relative of hers. As a Christian gentleman, Sarah whispered, he might be willing to help her in some trouble that had befallen her.

The woman knowingly pursed her lips. ‘And what might this gentleman’s name be?’

Sarah uttered it.

‘Why, yes. Captain Hanner, indeed. There ain’t a better man in Pittsharbor, I believe, although I don’t know him personal. Came up here two years ago, he did, from somewhere west. Married Charlotte Day within six month and built her a house on the bluff, out the other side of the harbour. Folk say he has a right nice little business started up, bringing ladies’ dress lengths and bits of finery up from Boston to please those as have the money for such stuff. I wouldn’t know a thing about that. Seems a strange manner o’work for a sea captain, although his wife’s father is a draper with a good old store over in Belfast. But there, you’ll know all this since he’s a relation o’yours.’

The woman studied her, hard-eyed and appraising.

‘How might I find the house?’ Sarah asked softly.

‘You take the Pittsharbor road and follow it on past the town and the harbour. You’ll see the headland and the place he’s built out there. Can’t miss it, if you keep within sight of the sea.’

Sarah paid for her food and lodging, and picked up the small carpet-bag containing her few belongings. She slipped her hand once into her deep pocket, making sure her ally was still at her side, then set out along the Pittsharbor road.

Once on the headland within sight of Robert Hanner’s house, Sarah waited impassively behind her screen of bushes until darkness fell. It was late September and the threat of ice already shivered the air. She saw the lamps lit in the windows of the house and stepped out of her shelter, leaving her carpet-bag behind her. She made her way silent-footed between the boxberry plants until she came close up to the house. Then, shadow-like, she melted into the deeper shadows beside the head-high pile of logs that had been providently stacked against the winter. She put her hand into her pocket and took out the long-bladed knife. The steel blinked its cold eye at her as she waited.

It was a weary interval before she heard the catch of the door undone and the creak of hinges. Sarah hefted the knife in her hand. She knew the weight and thrust of it too well from the work of stripping blubber off the stinking carcasses of whales.

Robert Hanner came out to the log-pile.

He was in his shirt-sleeves and with him came the scent of good food cooking and the warmth of a fireside. He bent to gather up the wood.

Sarah knew where to drive in the blade. She must guide it between the ribs and up, up into the tissue of the lung. Her arm, her whole body twitched violently with the anticipated thrust, but she could not make it come. Instead, she saw the body of poor Martin the bowman. He lay in the bottom of the whaleboat, his clothing ripped from him and his chest tom open by the line. She saw the bluish-white splintered ruin of his rib-cage and the crimson pulp within that pulsed with the dying rhythm of his heart. It was an image that still visited her dreams. At the same time she heard the steady voice of good Matthias Plant. His fatherly kindness was a long time ago, but it was almost the last she had known.

The hand that held the knife hung paralysed at her side.

Robert Hanner gathered up the logs and all unknowing turned back to his family fireside.

She left the Captain’s House and the headland, and carried her bag down to the silent harbour.

Moored to one of the jetty posts she found a dory and a stout pair of oars stowed within it. Her one thought was to remove herself, to retreat like a nocturnal animal beyond the reach of light and humanity. She unhitched the boat and bent to the oars. After the weight and speed of the whaleboat the little craft seemed no more substantial than an eggshell as she drove it through the swell.

Sarah rowed herself across the bay and out where the current ran between the island and the rocky promontory that jutted from the headland. Pittsharbor town nestled safely in its hollow, as far out of her reach as the moon.

Her first thought had been to row on to the horizon, until either weariness or the waves extinguished her. But some small flame of self-preservation still burned in Sarah, and the flicker of it made her turn her practised oar so that the dory drew broadside to the island and the shoreline that faced the open sea. She paddled through the surf and the prow of the boat grated on the shingle. With strength that she did not know she possessed she hauled it up out of reach of the greedy tide.

Above the beach she climbed upwards through the pucker-brush. The wind was rising and the first raindrops needled her face.

There was a shelter at the crest of the first ridge. She almost fell against the primitive structure of wood and rough stone, and the door creaked open at her touch. Inside nothing was visible in the intense blackness, but it was at least a protection from the rising storm. She reached out and followed the line of the wall with her chilled hand until she found the cobwebbed corner. She sank down on to her haunches, then to the bare earth floor. Out of her soaked bag she took a shawl and wrapped it around her shoulders. Only then did she allow her head to sink on to her knees and the hopeless tears to run out of her eyes.

The wind rose to a shriek, and rain and salt spray battered the walls of the hut. The storm raged all through the night and into the next day.

When the morning light began to thin the gloom Sarah was able to look around her. The few articles left inside the shelter were instantly familiar. There was a long-handled spade whose once-sharp blade was now rusty with disuse and a wooden bucket. The spade would have been used for severing the tendons of a whale’s flukes, and for cutting deep incisions in the blubber by which the creature could be roped and towed back to the whaling ship for dismemberment, and the bucket was just the same as the one she had used for bailing sea water at Matthias’s shouted command. From a peg on the wall looped a coil of whale line and on a shelf above it stood a brave row of pewter tankards.

The shelter into which she had stumbled was a whalers’ refuge, a rough tavern for the crews of the small boats seeking to capture those whales which came close in to the shore. Their business must have been a disappointment because the place had been abandoned. But the irony at having fetched up in such a resort made Sarah’s mouth twist in a bitter smile.

She waited out the daylight in the ruined tavern, venturing out into the wind-tossed open only once, to drink a mouthful of water from a brackish spring and gather a stained handful of wild berries to eat.

When night fell once more the wind dropped at last, but huge seas still battered the growling shingle. Sarah knew there could be no waiting for the waves to subside; she must row back to the mainland and do the deed that was waiting for her. She slipped through the trees and over the rocks to the beach, where the dory lay waiting for her. No fishermen from Pittsharbor had put to sea today.

Somehow she found the strength to propel the boat through the swell and spume to the bay shore. Drenched to the skin and light-headed with thirst and hunger she staggered across the shingle and climbed the rocks of the bluff. The soft lamplight shone from the windows of Robert and Charlotte Hanner’s house.

Tonight she lacked even the cunning to try to conceal herself. She dragged herself to the nearest window and pressed her numb face to it.

A young woman sat within, dark-haired and dark-browed, with her head bowed in tender contemplation of the infant in her lap. In the background her husband busied himself with some small domestic business. The three of them were bathed in light and warmth, with the baby helpless and soft-limbed at the centre of the tableau.

Sarah’s mouth stretched wide in a silent howl. She knew she could not murder Robert Hanner. The determination she had nourished melted away like icicles in May and left her with nothing. The emptiness in her heart was worse than hatred; it was resignation and death itself.

The young wife looked up and saw the face at the window. Her scream as she snatched the child to her breast was so shrill that its echoes cut through the boiling of the waves and silenced them. Sarah turned and ran from the world for the last time.

She took the dory out once more and rowed through the wicked surf to the island. She waded the last few steps with the undertow ravenous at her legs and fell in exhaustion on to the bay shore. The boat tossed in the breakers and was carried away from her.

Somehow Sarah found her way over the island’s crest to her last shelter. She spent one more long night huddled in the tavern corner and when the dirty light of morning crept around her once again she stood upright. She wrote some lines on a piece of paper from her pocketbook and printed the man’s name on the folded sheet, before tucking it securely into her clothing. Then she picked up her bag with the few belongings and the knife that had lain on the earth floor beside her. She carried both of them down to the shore and dropped the bag into the sea. It wallowed at her feet for a moment, a waterlogged torso, then the current sucked it away. The knife she threw after it. It made a cold arc as it flew through the air.

She went slowly back to the whalers’ hut and took the line down from its peg. Whaleline was both strong and light, the finest exemplar of the ropemaker’s art. The best hemp was impregnated with tar vapour and three strands of seventeen yarns each were woven together, every one of those strands separately tested to sustain a burden of one hundred and twelve pounds. Her own meagre weight would make no impression on such a piece of line.

Above the shelter there was a sturdy oak tree with a convenient branch some seven feet from the ground. She climbed into the tree and tied one end of the line to a branch over her head. She lowered the free end and measured the drop with her eye. Then, using the boatman’s hitches that Matthias Plant had taught her aboard the Dolphin, she fashioned the noose.

She did not sit long on her perch with the sea’s merciless chorus loud in her ears. She closed her eyes and dropped into silent space.