“Who knows?” she says, holding the breeze, keeping it. “They’re gone, in any case.”
Jack says, “That’s one way of looking at it, I suppose. Will you come and take down the numbers for the goods before the men take them to the hold?”
“Give me a moment to…get something from the cabin. I shall be there directly.”
“Very well.” Jack turns on his heels and marches past the contraband stacked along the gangway to a place near the bow where Harry Tremayne and Dick Pascoe are counting small wooden crates.
She slips down the ladder and into the cabin. The sun falls in at a slant, the skylight is a rectangle of pure blue. It smells of polished wood and of the sea. She leans back against the side of the ship, sinking to a crouch. It is only then that she allows the tears to come, rocking back and forth on the balls of her feet as she weeps for the parents she never knew, whether they were the couple fleeing Paris or whether they were other parents, forever unknown to her. The sea took them, if they were her parents. If they weren’t, the sea took them still. Just as she lost George far away at sea, aboard a ship, just as Jack lost Mary-Anne, she lost these parents she cannot even remember. If they were hers.
She nearly chokes on the thought. It’s obscene that she should love the sea as she does when all it has done is rob her of her family.And what of Jack? Will the sea claim him, too?
Her eyes move from the skylight to the hull of the ship. Beyond it lies the ocean, vast, unknowable like her parents. Except, she feels she does know it. That moment in the creek, when she felt she had come home, the voice calling to her, the dreams she’s had full of shadows in the water—there’s a sense of familiarity to it all. Maybe she has always known it, maybe that’s why she longs for the sea like she does.
The story Madame Kerjean told her fits, and yet it doesn’t. Could she have been on that ship and washed up on the shores of Cornwall? It’s possible. Only, the ship left Roscoff on the sixth of September and the crossing shouldn’t have taken more than five or six days, yet shewasn’t discovered in Helford until September the twenty-fifth. Was the ship blown off course? Had she been in the ocean or somewhere on the Cornish coast, alone, perhaps? But the latter didn’t explain why she was dripping seawater when she was found.
Or is she not the girl from the French ship, is she someone else, perhaps even—miraculously—someone whose father could be a spirit of the sea, an invocation against its dangers, a creature of legend, as the people of Helford have been telling her?
She presses the heels of her hands to her eyes. A dull headache pulses behind them. She has never been forced to examine her origins so closely before. Though she wondered, she was content to accept they were unknown. She had her parents, whom she loved, and that was enough. Only now it isn’t any longer. The sea calls to her more insistently all the time and she cannot tell if it’s because she lives so near it or because of something else.
One thing she does know. When Jack said one couldn’t grow up in Cornwall without accepting that there may be some truth in the old stories, he was right. The Helford River, with its hidden coves and trails, with its shadowy creeks and turquoise waters opening to the sea as if to embrace it, is a place in which fairy stories may just be true.
The tears keep coming. She stays down in the cabin too long. The door opens and then Jack is crouching in front of her, saying, “Don’t cry.” He takes her hands from her eyes and pulls her up to standing. She wants to move into his arms, but instead she leans back against the side of the ship. Jack says, “They were your parents then?”
“I don’t know. My father was Admiral Farnworth. My mother was…my mother. Before all else, she was my mother. Those people who fled Paris—I’ll never know now.” She wipes her eyes with the cuff of her sleeve. “I don’t know why it makes me so sad. Nothing has changed. They were always either going to be dead or they didn’t want me. I knew that from the moment I learned the story of how I was found, but now…I can’t stop thinking of how the sea took them, even if theyweren’tmy natural parents, just like it took George and…” She trails off.
“And what?”
“What if it takes you, too?”
“Listen,” he says. “The sea takes, but it also gives.”
“That sounds like blasphemy.”
“Because it’s close to Scripture? What does it matter when it’s true? Besides the practical stuff, does it not also give you great happiness to stand on deck with the wind in your hair and a fast sea below your feet? You’ve felt it, haven’t you?”
“I have.”
“Then if you may not have a merman for your father, perhaps think of the sea as your mother. That way you shall never truly be orphaned.”
“What a strange thought, Jack.”
Looking away, he says, “I invented it when I was six, when I lost my mother. It helped me, especially at night, when my father had gone to sea, leaving my sisters and me with our governess. I felt terribly alone. I could hear the sea outside my window and I imagined it was my mother, singing me a lullaby.” He’s silent for a moment, then says, “Even what happened with Mary-Anne could not change how I feel about the ocean.”
The image of him as a little boy, alone, makes the tears rise again. The distance between the two of them, however small, is suddenly too much; she closes it in two steps and wraps her arms around his waist. Long seconds pass, then he puts his arms around her shoulders and she leans in, sniffing into his shirt. “Careful, it’s my best one,” he says.
This makes her laugh, in spite of it all. “It’s your most mended one and you’ve worn it five days without washing.”
“It’s my best one because you’ve mended it, and in case you didn’t know, it’s only wash day once a week at sea. Besides, you’ve been wearing my other shirt all through the crossing.” He lets go of her and moves to the door. “Come, why don’t you change back into it and play at being a ship’s boy some more? I could use your help on deck. We’ve never carried such a variety of goods in one run before.”
Chapter Thirteen
The next three days she feels how she imagines a bird might feel when it first learns to fly—as if the world belongs to her. Despondency leaves her; she has decided to stop worrying about the couple from Paris, the voice in the river, and old tales about merfolk. It’s not even happiness, she thinks; it’s a contentedness so deep it’s growing roots. They have what Jack calls “fair winds”—it blows hard, but not too violently, in the direction of England. She wishes it would blow the other way, far out into the Atlantic, away from the old pilchard shed and the moment she must leave the ship and her place at Jack’s side in the hammock at night.
On her last full day at sea, she cannot stop looking at him. When they go ashore, the closeness between them will fracture. Maybe they’ll meet on the coastal path or in the village, or they’ll see each other across the dining room at Weatherston. It will never be like this again.
As the day wears on, a terrible restlessness grows inside her. She feels almost delirious with yearning and on the verge of tears at the same time. The yearning is not for the sea, as it normally is. Every night she has resisted the urge to kiss Jack, to ask him to put his arms around her; to beg him to claim something he has not sought.
By the time the sun lowers itself into the ocean she can bear it no longer. They’re in the cabin together, as they are every evening, Jacktaking off his jacket and draping it across the chair, her turned away, hiding the burning inside her by examining the knots and grains in the wood of the hull. The cabin is full of shadows. It’s a new moon and Jack has suspended a lantern from a hook in the deck above, but has not yet lit it, for the sky visible through the skylight is still the bruised purple of dusk.
