After another half mile, Jack stops and points at a rocky climb down to a small cove, with a strip of pebbles for a beach. The water babbles around the stones. “Do you think you can get down?”
“I think so,” she says. “If you’ll go ahead of me.”
“It’s easier to get here by boat.”
The black stone is warm under her hands, the way down steeper than she thought. Once, her foot slips and she catches herself by gripping a piece of rock jutting out, as Jack takes hold of her ankle and guides her to a better foothold. She still feels the pressure of his fingers by the time she reaches the bottom.
Jack puts the oatcakes and bottle on top of a flat stone and wipes first his forehead and then his neck. “Absurd weather for the time of year.”
“Thank you for bringing me here,” she says.
“It’s a handsome little cove, isn’t it?” A grin, half hidden behind his fingers. “Handsome like you.”
“Jack, stop,” she says. She’s laughing and blushing and her heart is soaring the way it used to around George when they first met. It shouldn’t, but it is. How different Jack is, she thinks, from how he was in her bed, when he suffered through the operation to remove the bullet from his side. And how different, too, from how he was during the dinner at Weatherston. Even when he was in pain, he was quick tolaugh, but now there’s a constant smile playing on his lips, which turns into a grin readily. Most of all he appears freer.
To distract herself, she says, “It’s far too hot to be standing here.” Unbuttoning her shoes, she pulls them off and trips to the water. The pebbles burn the soles of her feet, but the river is mercifully cool. She wades in deeper, calling, “It’s wonderful!”
She watches Jack take off his riding boots and turns back to the river, squinting a little against the diamond glimmer of the surface. The muslin of her dress fans out around her. How lovely it would be to go for a swim, she thinks, feeling the tug of the sea—but what would Jack say?
She splashes water on her face and neck, and the impulse flies at her, too strong to resist. Flinging her arms out, she dives in, dress, chemise, stays, and all. The water is biting cold, as it was before; it’s biting her flesh and grabbing her breath and twisting it, but oh, the feeling of it, the freedom.
“Isabel!” Jack calls, and she turns belly-up in a swirl of cotton and waves at him.
“Come swim!”
“You’re mad!” he shouts, but he’s laughing and wading in, then he, too, dives in. He’s a strong swimmer, she sees at once; he’ll catch up with her in seconds, unless…
The river envelops her as she glides through the water, her arms and legs moving as if they’ve never done anything but swim. And maybe, just maybe they haven’t, because to swim in a cool sea-river on a day like today with Jack swimming alongside her must surely be the loveliest thing in the world.
The water swooshes, laps, sings; she’s one with it, swimming like a fish. The ribbon with George’s medal on it drags at her neck. Her gown flows around her like a second skin, like scales, and all of a sudden, she thinks:I’m home.
She doesn’t know if she’s thinking it because of the river or Jack or the village of Helford, in which she was found nineteen years ago. It’s not even truly a thought. It’s a feeling, a sense of homecoming.
“Isabel!”
She turns to look at him. To her surprise, she’s some distance away, along the length of Frenchman’s Creek. The arm of the river isn’t very wide, but Jack is waving at her and calling to her as if itis.
She takes a deep breath and ducks under the surface, kicking her legs to gain depth. She begins to swim back to the cove underwater, but a sound makes her turn. Her dress follows in a slow, twisting billow. She strains to listen. Yes, there it is again, clearly: a voice, the voice from before, only this time it’s not the breeze or the birds or any such thing. It’s the river itself, calling:Swim. Come home.The voice is just ahead, toward the mouth of the creek. There’s a seductiveness in it and, without quite deciding she’s going to, she swims towardit.
Come home.Fainter, distant now. The river regains its usual sound of moving water mixed with the blood rushing in her ears. After another few strokes she gives up her pursuit. The river is a cool, green cocoon as she swims back to the cove, still underwater. She thought she felt more herself last night at Weatherston, but now she knows she was wrong. She has become herself here, at last, in the depths of Frenchman’s Creek.
A hand clamps around her arm and yanks. The jolt is so sudden she opens her mouth to scream and it fills with water. The river has come for her, she thinks, panicking that the shadow has got her. Kicking, she tries to wrench herself free, and then she’s breaking through the surface, coughing and spluttering. Jack is holding her up, his feet on the bottom where she cannot stand, a stone’s throw from the shore. “My God, Isabel,” he says.
He’s so close she can see every drop of water on his face and his lips, inches from her own. She’d only have to lean in to kiss him. He’s still holding her, his arms around her waist now, their bodies as close as they were on the horse, and she wants to kiss him, but instead she says, “Why did you do that?”
His shirt sticks to his chest. She can feel every ridge under it. He says, “I thought you were drowning. I’ve never seen anybody stayunder that long.” He looks at her strangely. “Are you certain you’re not half mermaid?”
She laughs, ignoring the uneasiness spurred by the voice she heard in the water. “That was never a part of the story. Half mermaid!”
“You swim like one,” he says, pushing a dripping strand of hair out of her face and tucking it behind her left ear. “You’re beautiful like one.”
“Jack,” she says quietly.Now he’s going to kiss me. They shouldn’t kiss, but they will. It feels inevitable, like night falling at the end of each day, like the tide.
Only he doesn’t. He lets go of her and swims to shore, where he sits on one of the black rocks in the sun. As she swims back, she watches him pull his shirt over his head and begin to wring it out. Everything is sharp and distinct in the sun—the water gushing from where his hands tighten around the bunched-up shirt, the clattering sound the water makes as it lands on the rocks, the round shape of his tanned shoulders as he leans forward, a raised line on his left one, where the skin is lighter, the way his hair falls across his brow.
Her eyes fall on the bandage.Ohno.
She steps out of the water sheathed in wet muslin. The cloth clings to her legs, the outline of her hips, the swell under her stays. She sees it in the way he looks up at her, the way his smile appears and overtakes him. She’s as visible to him as he is to her in his wet breeches and with his shirt removed. There’s no embarrassment, neither on her part or his—or so she thinks. And there’s the bandage.
