Chapter Eight
After a few moments, Finn gently took hold of Rose’s wrists and held them still.
Gasping in air, she could do nothing except stare up into his familiar face — so beloved to her, she had nearly wished her own death rather than live without seeing him again.
In his eyes, she saw terrible sadness, and what else?
“Rose,” he said her name again, softly.
All the fight went out of her, leaving her with the intense desire to sleep. Wrenching her arms free, she plunked herself down upon the bench. A moment later, Finn sat beside her.
“Rose!” she sputtered, looking not at him but at the ocean — the beautiful and fearsome ocean that had supposedly swallowed him whole over three years past.
“Is that all you have to say? How can it be you? You’re dead!”
“People don’t die and then come back,” she heard him say, causing her to whip her head around and gawk at him.
“That’s exactly what you’ve done,” Rose argued. “Itisyou? Isn’t it?”
“Ay,” Finn admitted, “but I didn’t die.” He shook his head, his mouth a grim line.
She took her eyes off of him again because it was almost too painful to look at him and, instead, stared out toward the horizon.
“The ship went down, all hands lost, no bodies recovered.” She spoke the words that had echoed in her brain over and over in the first few days after the sinking.
Rose could see that he was staring at her profile, yet she couldn’t look at him again. She was overwhelmed — her brain buzzing with the impossibility of it, her heart squeezing with pain and then with intense gladness.
At last, Finn began to speak. “Storm clouds came up so fast, it was as if they were being pulled and pushed on purpose until they were directly over us. Thick and gray.” His words were flat, unemotional. “The wind howled like a banshee. None of it was predicted for that April day. The ship was doomed from the start. Poor design,” he added matter-of-factly.
“The center of gravity was too high,” she said quietly, recalling his words when he’d told her his concerns.
“You remembered. Yes, it did precisely as I feared when a few waves washed over her bow. Tipped like a top-heavy tree in a hurricane. I saw the first men washed into the sea, and then we all went in.”
Rose realized she was listening with her eyes closed, simply taking in the sound of his voice and making sure it was real and familiar. That this man was truly her dead husband.
“When it was over, I ended up clinging to a plank no bigger than a door. Another two sailors grabbed on. Eventually they died.”
“Eventually?”
“I lost track of time,” Finn explained, “but I think I floated for about four days, maybe five.”
“With no food or water,” she murmured, recalling how she, herself, had existed on a few cups of tea and little else for the first few days after he’d been reported dead. To think that he was on the sea on a board, without even the comfort of a sip of water.
“I started seeing things,” Finn continued. “I saw you walking toward me one day, and I was so damn happy. When you got closer, you disappeared, of course. My heart felt as though it didn’t beat evenly, and my leg muscles especially started to twitch. I went to sleep at some point, and when I awoke, I was being hauled onto the deck of a fishing vessel, like a bloody great tuna.”
“Where have you been?”Was that really her own voice?It sounded frail and desperate.
“After I was rescued, I was taken up into the Icelandic waters. They were going out for four months, and no amount of bribery would turn them around. After all, I didn’t exactly have anything to offer them except a promise of future payment. There was nothing I could do.”
“Nothing you could do,” Rose repeated. “Surely, you haven’t been fishing for over three years.”
“No, only about two and a half months,” he said. “I had strange visions, and of course, I had lost a lot of weight. Apparently, I was out of my head when the fishermen found me. I woke every night for weeks in a cold sweat, screaming until the captain made me sleep on deck away from his men.”
If she’d been with him, she would have put her arms around him and held him while he slept. She’d heard of men coming back from the war between the states having terrible nightmares even while awake and worse, becoming violent. She would not ever have felt afraid of Finn, no matter how he behaved.
“Eventually, the visions stopped, and I learned to fish, but I hated it.” He sounded fierce about that, the first passion he’d displayed since she’d come upon him.
“It was a good thing they found me and kept going. If someone had brought me straight to land, I think I never would’ve gone to sea again. Eventually I got passage on another fishing vessel that came close to the first. It was heading for Great Britain. I was put off in Plymouth and made my way north to Newcastle.”
