She begins to make her way back to Helford, wiping her hand on her gown over and over. He was in her cottage. He kissed her hand, right there by the knuckles. Behind her, the crowd has quieted again. Glancing back over her shoulder, she sees the onlookers have removed their hats. There isn’t any birdsong now; the air has grown still as stone. Then there’s a crunch and a snapping, clear even from this distance, followed by a woman’s scream so full of despair it could split the marrow in one’s bones.
Back at the cottage, she goes through the motions of cooking the mackerel and carrot into a pasty-looking soup. She opens the door a crack to let out the smells. Gradually, the shakiness inside her drains away. The sound of the river sloshes in through the open door. It doesn’t calm her as much as it normally does, because through it she keeps hearing the crunch and the desperate cry that followed.
At night, the house creaks and moans around her. When she sleeps, she dreams of footsteps. The servants, up at all hours. They are calling in subdued voices. Did something happen? Is somebody ill; is there a fire?
She sits up with a jolt. She’s not dreaming. The footsteps are real. They’re downstairs and there are voices trailing them, climbing over them: male voices, low against the sound of the wind.
Her heart drums in her throat. She’s certain they can hear it. She places her hand on her throat and feels it pulsing against her palm. A scraping noise downstairs—a chair being moved or the door? She looks around the room for something to defend herself with. The fire poker. It’s made of wrought iron with a pommel at the end. The iron is cold in her hand, the poker reassuringly heavy. The air swishes when she gives it a swing.
She stands behind the bedroom door, clutching the poker. Footsteps start to come up the stairs and stop. “It’s narrow, but I think we can haul him up,” a voice says, and there’s a groan from somewhere down below.
“There’s a bed. It’ll be worth your while, Captain.” The first voice again, and then the speaker’s feet resume their climbing.
Other feet follow. They’re moving more slowly than she expected. There’s another groan, loud enough to be heard above the wind. A man in pain, she thinks. A man who is being carried up the stairs. A glow appears in the doorway.
Then the doorway fills—there are five of them, but in the light of the lantern, she sees only him. Sweat pastes a shock of black hair to his forehead, and even in the faint light, she sees his face is so pale it has an almost gray hue, laid over the evidence of suntan like a veil. He’s clean-shaven and his shirt is unlaced and partly torn, revealing a bleeding wound somewhere in the middle of his torso. The white shirt has turned mostly red. The man’s eyes are closed, and for a moment she believes him dead, but then he opens them and fixes them on her. And, extraordinarily, he smiles. Quietly, he says, “Look what the wind has blown in.”
Three men carry him; a fourth follows behind with a wad of bloodied cloth and a lantern, a tin-and-glass one he holds up high. They turn to her, and the one at the back reaches for something at his waist, fumbling with the cloth as he does it—a pistol, she realizes, and she lifts the poker. But the wounded man says, “Oppy!” sharply, the muscles in his face pulling taut, and when the man called Oppy looks athim, the wounded one shakes his head before closing his eyes as they lower him onto the bed.
When he opens them again, she’s still standing there, transfixed, the poker halfway to her shoulder. One of the other men, a bearded, bull-necked fellow with black teeth, says, “You can lower the poker, miss. We’re no threat to you, if you aren’t one to us.”
Chapter Three
The room is crowded with the five of them in it. There’s very little space to stand around the bed. The smell of blood mixes with the damp, old smell of the house. “What happened to him?” Her voice isn’t her own. Tremulous, high.
The wounded man himself answers. “I got shot.” Then the man called Oppy bends his thin-as-a-reed body over the bed and places his lantern on the windowsill. With two hands he presses the bloodied cloth to the man’s stomach. The wounded man swears loudly, using words she’s never heard before, though it’s clear what they mean, and Oppy grimaces as if he feels the pain himself. He runs a hand through his thick brown hair and some of the blood from his fingers sticks toit.
“He needs a doctor,” she says less shrilly.
“We’re well aware.” The man who says this is mostly bald like the innkeeper of the Shipwrights Arms, but he’s young to be so, only a few years older than her, she thinks. The wounded man, too, is fairly young, maybe twenty-nine or thirty, though possibly the pain makes him look older. The other two she thinks are in their midthirties. The shorter of these, who’s strong-looking in a wiry sort of way, is holding two pistols, one in each hand.
Her heart still beats in her throat. Sweat runs down her back, underneath the cotton of her chemise. There are five strange men in her room and she’s in a state of undress. Her hair is in a long plait downher back. It’s coming loose. She isn’t wearing her stays.How’s that for rumors?She feels sick, her legs pudding-like.
A low moan from the wounded man drags her out of her thoughts. Oppy is still pressing the cloth to the wound, but it isn’t doing much good. The cloth is too drenched with blood. She thinks of George, of when he was shot on board HMSNeptune,how there wasn’t a bed for him to lie in or a woman to help care for him. She goes to the stairs, and when the taller of the two older men moves to stop her, she snaps, “I’m going to get water from the well.”
The man says, “Captain?”
“Let her go, Moyle,” the man on the bed says tiredly.
She walks down the stairs as if in a dream, her hand on the wall for support. She’s shaking inside, rattling with it. Any moment now she thinks her teeth are going to chatter, but they don’t, and she feels her way along the wall to the back door. Trembling, she takes her pelisse from where it hangs on a nail in the wall and shrugs it on. In the garden, too, everything is dreamlike. There’s no moon and she wishes she’d brought a candle, but after a moment her eyes adjust. The sea appears to emit a faint light as she walks down the path to the paradise garden.
The well is dark and bottomless. She has trouble gripping the pulley crank at first; she’s shaking so. As she begins to turn it, she thinks she shouldn’t be doing it. She shouldn’t be fetching water for these men. She should run. She should make her way to the village and call for help. They are smugglers, she’s sure of it—smugglers or perhaps pirates. They wouldn’t come in the dead of night carrying pistols if their business was respectable. She should try to go to St. Keverne and find the customhouse and…and watch these men get hanged just like that smuggler, Jed Ferries, this morning? Condemned without a trial, on her testimony alone, for…what, exactly? Bringing a wounded man into her house? She has no proof of their smuggling, and—she almost jerks with the realization—even if she did, she’d be loath to hand them over to a man such as Lieutenant Sowerby.
The thought steadies her. So does that of George, dying on theNeptune. James, who’d been a member of one of the gun crews, told Isabel afterward that he’d watched as they brought George below. He told her of George’s last moments, of his bravery. James said he lay there, waiting for the surgeon to pass judgment, James himself with a leg wound beside him. When it was George’s turn the surgeon said there was nothing he could do for him and there were others he might save, so George lay there, breath frothing because of the hole in his chest. “He said to tell you he loves you,” James told her. She’d pictured it: George, choking on blood, saying,tell her I love her.The image never left her.
Tears slip down her face as she turns the crank of the well. She brushes at them angrily. Her grip slackens; the bucket drops, but she grasps the crank hard, and using both hands, hauls the bucket all the wayup.
She returns to the bedroom carrying the bucket and her chemise from the travel case, the silk one with the lace she’d bought for George’s homecoming. The man called Moyle and the balding man are about to leave. The other two regard her warily as she approaches the wounded captain on the bed, bucket in one hand, the silk chemise bunched in the other. She considered taking one of her other chemises, not wanting to spoil the silk, but she has only three others, all functional, strong cotton ones, which are more useful for wearing here.
“There you are,” the captain says, as if he’s been waiting for her, or perhaps he guessed she might run and tell somebody. He says, “I apologize for disturbing you. We believed the cottage empty.”
“You shouldn’t talk.” She’s still wearing the pelisse. Pushing up a sleeve, she dips the garment into the bucket and wipes the sweat from the captain’s brow. His eyes, dark blue by the light of the lantern, stay on hers as she does it. After a moment, she hands the cloth to Oppy and says, “That cloth is soaked through. Use this instead.”
He lifts it up, fingering the material as if he’s a buyer in a shop. “This fine stuff?”
“It’ll do the job the same as cotton.”
She takes the sullied cloth from him and places it on the floor by her feet. There’s the sound of footsteps on the stairs, going down, then the scrape of the front door as Moyle and the bald man leave.
