“Your ship should have been in a fortnight ago?” Lorcan asked Hardy.
“It’s been nigh on three weeks now,” he said grimly.
Lorcan said nothing. They all knew what that meant.
“There’s my ship,” he said absently. “See her, way out next to the clipper? A converted merchant.”
Bolt whistled in approval.
“She’s bonnie,” Hardy said shortly.
“Aye,” Lorcan agreed.
So odd, the outsized affection one felt for those crafts. They were enormous when viewed moored next to humans. Tiny as corks when seen at a distance bobbing on the indifferent ocean. Mankind was purely mad to attempt it at all. Though of course, this had never stopped a man from doing anything. Madness, arguably, perpetuated the species.
Far off in the distance lightning slashed the sky. A reminder that they were at the mercy of the elements.
For a moment they all stood and stared, as if that way they could will the ship into appearing in port.
Later, he remembered what came next as a sequence of sounds:
The slaps of little running feet on the damp dock.
A splash, as though someone had tossed something small, perhaps a brick, into the water.
Then a scream that split the heavens like the end of time.
Lorcan saw Michael’s bright blond head bobbing in the slate water, his little arms thrashing it into foam.
The sea was already coming for him, ready to do what it did so well, bear him under and away.
Lorcan ripped off his coats and plunged in.
The icy water nearly punched his breath from him. The weight of it shocked him as it shoved him sideways. He was purely mad, but in madness was strength.
In two strokes he was near the bright hair just as it was about to bob beneath a swell.
He lunged and caught hold of a fistful of his little shirt, then a soft, plump little arm, and he managed to hoist the boy, who weighed no more than Lorcan’s boots, it seemed, over his head. He took a face full of water and nearly went under. He threw his head back and saw the gray sky, and he turned it toward the sound of screaming and shouting.
He saw that Hardy was stretched out over the water like a ladder, Delacorte and Bolt holding on to his legs. With an awkward one-armed stroke and treading kicks, he managed to get close enough to lever the boy up and into Hardy’s reaching hands. Hardy caught the sobbing child by the trousers and pulled him into his body.
Relief nearly sank Lorcan. His boots felt like anchors as heavy gray curls of water assaulted him and pulled him backward again. He struggled to get closer to the dock using overarm strokes. The cold and the weight of the water and his clotheswanted to take him under. How odd would it be to die so close to land, after all this time.
And he thought, of all the ways he could have died over the years, perhaps he’d merely been waiting for the one most worthy. The one which, like the other chances he’d been given, would get him at least a shot at the pearly gates.
And then a rope slapped him in the face.
Delacorte had found it and hurled it with admirable aim. Lorcan caught hold of it and gripped it hand over fist. The three men towed him in until he was level with the pier. Then a half-dozen hands were hard in his armpits, arms, legs, as they hoisted his sopping bulk out of the sea and onto the dock.
He crouched on his hands and knees as those hands came down hard on his back. He hacked and vomited a stream of water.
Then turned over and collapsed on his back.
Sobbing for breath he managed, “Is... he...”
“The boy’s fine, he’s alive.” He wasn’t certain who said it.
He collapsed, heaving, on his back, and looked up to see the boy’s mother’s face, radiating light like an angel, her son sobbing in her arms.You have no one, Daphne had said. And then he closed his eyes and wondered what it would be like to have anyone scream for him.
