Dick and Oppy come up. Even by the light of the candle and the lantern Oppy carries, she can tell they’re both paler than they were two nights before. Oppy has blue half-moons under his eyes and a stubble flecked with red; Dick’s eyes are red-rimmed, as if he hasn’t slept for the past two days.
Jack says, “All well?” and Oppy tells him yes, they’ve unloaded the cargo, it’s stored, and will be taken inland in two days. They have brought him a clean shirt and Isabel begins to turn away so he can change out of the bloodstained one he’s wearing over the bandaging, but then she catches the look of pain on his face as he struggles with the cloth.
“Here, let me do it,” she says. The heat from her face runs down her arms, down her stomach, making her feel as if every inch of her is blushing as she helps him pull the shirt over his head. He’s smiling at her. There’s the thin line of black hair down his stomach again, only the top of it visible, the rest under the bandage. The hair on his chest matches it, dark against his tanned skin, and he’s broad shouldered, but not as much as Dick or the doctor. He’s leaner, as if not everything about him is hard, as if she could discover some softness in him if she had the chance. This makes her blush worse and he sees it, and now he’s not smiling, but openly grinning as she fumbles with the clean shirt and finally manages to slip it on and fasten the laces.
She has only ever seen George like this. That takes care of the blush;it seeps from her cheeks, from her stomach. Now she does turn away and says, “I don’t think you should walk.”
No answer. He’s too stubborn. Oppy hands her the lantern and he and Dick move to carry their captain, but Jack tells them to support him under the arms instead. As they hoist him up, the pain digs into his features and she says, “No, don’t. You shouldn’t.” But then he’s on his feet and takes a tentative step toward the door. It’s the first time she has seen him upright and not on the bed or being carried. He’s stooping and leaning heavily on his friends, but she can tell he’s taller than she had thought, almost as tall as Tom Holder, who is the tallest man she knows.
She goes ahead, holding up the lantern to light the way, counting Jack’s steps. Every one of them takes a long time. Two to the door, because he got off the bed on the side closest to it, then ten down the stairs. These are the worst and take the longest. Then four more to go through the kitchen. The scrape of the door and then they’re outside. The moon is a sliver in the sky. The gravel crunches under the soles of the men’s boots. At the bottom of the garden, close to the wall, a small rowboat is pulled up on the rocks. The night is black as coal, but on the river, it’s a little less so, as if the water makes its own light.
Dick and Oppy get in first, then they help Jack into the boat. When he’s safely seated in the stern, Oppy takes back the lantern and puts it next to Jack, while Dick gets out to push the boat into the water. The two men each take a set of oars. Jack looks up at her and half bows, which is difficult sitting down and, she worries, must hurt his stomach even more. “Fair winds, Isabel!” he says softly.
She lifts her hand and says, “Goodbye!” almost in a whisper, and then the oars slide into the water and quietly, smoothly, the boat pulls away from the shore.
She stands by the water, watching the three figures in the boat until the night swallows them. She shivers in her dress; she should’ve worn her pelisse. Perhaps she should learn how to knit herself a shawl like the ones the Cornish women wear. It’d be another thing with which to occupy herself, now that she no longer has to care for a woundedsmuggler. There are many such things. She has more cooking to learn and much in the way of cleaning, washing, and other tasks. Her life is full enough as it is and she doesn’t want any trouble. Most of all, she doesn’t want any whispers to trail her like they did the past months, before she came to Cornwall. No one can know about Jack’s two-day stay at the cottage. The mere thought of what people might say if they knew is unbearable.
It’s why you left London, isn’t it? Because of trouble,he said, far too astute for her liking. The thought of Jack learning of the rumors about her and James is upsetting in its own right. Why, she isn’t sure. Jack’s a smuggler—he breaks the law for a living—yet the possibility that she might lose his good opinion makes her feel queasy. She resolves never to tell—if she sees him again, which isn’t at all certain.
Making her way back up the path, she casts a glance at the shed. It’s so dark she can only see its outline, black against the sky. She couldn’t very well allow smugglers to store their contraband in there. She’d be committing a crime.
The cottage’s window glows yellow. She goes in, drawing the door shut behind her, and taking up the candle, goes upstairs. The room still smells of Jack. Of blood, too. She lifts the bloodied shirt from where he dropped it on the bed. She’ll have to wash all these blankets and sheets and scrub down the mattress. Tomorrow she’ll figure out how to use the tub and clean her clothes. It can’t be hard, can it? She’ll use water from the river; it’ll be easier than getting water from the well.
Practical things. She has a new life to learn, to live. It doesn’t have smugglers in it. It shouldn’t have.
She strips the blankets and sheets from the bed and drops them in the corner onto the floor. Taking her cloak from the travel case, she drapes it over her as a makeshift blanket and lies on top of the mattress. She never took her dress off the second night she slept next to Jack. She doesn’t take it off now. The room is colder without him in it. Darker, too. She didn’t think she could feel any more alone than she did during her first night in the cottage. It takes a long time for sleep to find her, for the sea to draw her toit.
When she does sleep, she’s back in the water. Her fish tail swishes and she’s propelled forward, the sea moving around her like the wind. Far below her are shapes, dark ones, like moving shadows. Large fish—only not quite. The tail swishes. There’s a power in it, a force of sorts. It runs through her veins; it shapes her muscles.
Upon waking, the sense of power lingers. Next time Lieutenant Sowerby comes too close, she’ll tell him to desist. She has no use for his attentions, and while he may have the authority of the law behind him when it comes to smugglers, he has no such control over her.
Richard Holder knocks on her door that morning, just before noon. He’s clutching a letter. It looks small in his hand. He says, “My father said I’d best bring it to you straight away.”
For a split second, she thinks the letter is from James, then she recognizes her stepmother’s slanted, jabbing script. Of course it isn’t from James. “I’ll write,” she told him before she left, but he told her not to. He was to go back to sea and if she wrote to him, it’d only cause more trouble.
She nearly fainted the first time he came to see her, when he told her of George’s last moments. Maybe that breached the distance in rank between them—him grabbing hold of her and guiding her to an armchair. Or maybe it was the way they talked, about seafaring and ships, about her father, under whom James had served when the admiral was still Captain Farnworth, and about George. He was a good officer, James said. The men liked him.
James’s stories forced the sharp teeth of time to recede. That’s why she invited him to tea, why they took walks along the Thames together, James still limping from his leg wound. That was not the only injury he sustained in the battle. Underneath an exterior hardened by over two decades at sea lay a dented spirit. He had trouble sleeping, he said; was startled by the slightest noise. When he did sleep he dreamed of the cannon shot that killed half the gun crew.
She, too, spent her nights in the past. In the dark, empty bedroom, memories whispered to her until they took on the color of the sea, fading to a misty gray-blue in sleep; during the day, they followed in thewake of James’s voice. Her friend Louisa later called him a “common sailor.” There was nothing common about James, but Isabel knew his lack of rank meant their friendship might raise eyebrows, and soon, gossip swirled around Greenwich. After losing George, it was a small thing—it was nothing. And it stayed nothing until Louisa saw them that day, three months ago.
James had George’s Trafalgar medal, which she’d kept in its case for a year, put on a black ribbon for her and she allowed him to fasten it around her neck. In that moment, it felt as if the silver disk was all she had left of George. Eyes streaming, she turned to James and embraced him. His arms locked around her shoulders and he was just telling her she was going to be fine when the footman showed in Louisa.I found her in the arms of a common sailor.That was the story Louisa, not much of a friend after all, told their acquaintances.The one she goes walking with. What would her husband have said?
Her protests were in vain. It wasn’t just their difference in standing that lent wings to the story, it was her widowhood, too. The fact that James had served under George made it worse: soon, it seemed as if all of Greenwich was talking. As the months passed, the stares and whispers became unbearable. Already she knew she wouldn’t be able to keep the house, not with their money gone. The rumors were the final straw. She had enough—of Greenwich, of London, of the whole of society.
The cottage Mr. Griggs wrote to her about sounded like a sanctuary. And now that she’s here, it is, in a manner. She has never before felt so alone, but neither, she realizes as she cuts open her stepmother’s letter, has she ever felt so free.
The letter contains a summons to Woodbury, her late father’s house in Norfolk. Her stepmother’s willingness to risk her reputation by association surprises her, but she couldn’t live under one roof with the new Mrs. Farnworth. Not even now. She much prefers the cottage and the village with its sea-river and people full of strange beliefs and stories—stories that stir a feeling in her not unlike the memories trailing James’s voice. As if the past is closer.
Chapter Five
During the days that follow she keeps up a flurry of activity. She washes clothes, sheets, and blankets until her hands are raw and hangs everything out to dry. She washes Jack’s shirt, too, but the blood doesn’t come out. The cotton is very fine. No wonder, she thinks, with the kind of profits he’s making. Mrs. Dowling tells her for stains on white you want to put the garment out to dry flat on the grass in the bright sun. “That’ll bleach it good and proper,” she says. Isabel doesn’t tell her what kind of stains they are.
She starts to mend the tear in the shirt. This is something she can do, at least, and do well. It’s a long rip, right across the bottom half, with a small part missing where the bullet took part of the cloth. She used to mend things for George sometimes. He could do it himself—they were taught how as midshipmen and of course any of the servants could do it—but she liked to do it for him.
Every afternoon, she sits on the white bench in the garden and sews. The river fans out before her like a length of blue silk satin under a partly cloudy sky. She watches the gulls dip and rise as she stitches. They make her think of the creatures George saw on his journeys: all manner of sharks and dolphins, strange fish with spiky bodies and giant white birds in South America, and once, a whale nearly the length of the ship. Nobody believed that one, but he swore it was true. She thinks of the villagers’ belief in the sea spirit shaped like amerman. Could it be that there are things in the ocean of which they have no knowledge? Almost as if in response, the sun appears, lifting the blue into bright iridescence as it hits the water, and the longing to get in and follow the current briefly takes her breath away.
The nights are quiet, apart from one. It’s the evening before the next market day, late enough only the moon differentiates between the black of the river and that of the sky. Isabel’s working her way through a leather-bound volume titledThe Experienced English Housekeeper,which Mrs. Dowling has lent her. She has just started on chapter fourteen, “Possets, Gruel &c.,” when she hears footsteps on the gravel path. Putting the book down, she listens closely. In response, the gravel crunches again, nearer to the cottage. She blows out the candle, and heart racing, feels her way to the fireplace in the sitting room.
