Maurice shot forward, but Arthur grabbed his bridle. Trembling, he garbled out, “It’s all right, you’re all right, it’s all right,” over and over.
With a final rumble, the earth closed. A tree sprouted, grew, and died, dripping with the same black ooze as so many others.
Arthur’s chest heaved. He looped the driving lines over ahealthy branch and crept toward the tree, shovel in hand. He tested each step, afraid the ground would give way beneath him, but it was as solid as ground should be.
The ooze smelled faintly mechanical. Arthur reached out but withdrew without touching it. He touched the shovel’s blade to it instead.
With a faint hiss, the metal corroded. Arthur flung the shovel aside and skittered back to the horse. Freya slunk down from her tree.
No cart. No way of getting Mrs. Livingston’s clock back from Port Lorne, if indeed he made it there. He had a horse but no saddle and didn’t know how to ride; he didn’t know if Maurice was saddle-broken anyway. The path had moved, he didn’t know where it was, and it had shifted about so much he couldn’t be sure of reaching either Port Lorne or home even if he found it. He had no luggage except for his knapsack with its single change of clothing, heating pad, three romance novels, shaving kit, torch, water bottle (half empty), and a few herbs he wasn’t sure he remembered how to use.
He couldn’t even use the heating pad, because he had no way to heat it, because he was Arthur and hadn’t thought to pack a firelighter or matches, though he’d known he’d spend more than one night camping in the forest.
“This is very bad.”
His voice was insignificant in the expectant silence of the wood. Freya brushed against his legs, but her company was paltry comfort now.
Figuring he was far closer to home than Port Lorne, Arthur turned reluctantly back the way he’d come. The way he thought he’d come. He could no longer tell.
ix. In which Charlotte has an unexpected visitor
Charlotte may have made her brother promise to return safely, but she was mortified to learn how much she’d come to rely on him in the last six months. He’d only left this morning; already she felt like everything was falling apart without him.
She’d been all right initially, except for the worry needling her insides. She’d made the children an early lunch and gone down to the village alone with her cane and her medical kit. That had been quite bad enough: People stopped talking abruptly when they saw her.
At first, she’d thought they were talking about her, not that she knew why they’d have cause to; she’d always worked hard to make sure they didn’t. Then she’d heard her brother’s name and Cormac Young’s—together. She didn’t know why that should be, either, since Cormac had never paid Arthur much mind. She’d turned her attention toward today’s patients, but the whispers persisted.
A village like Seacliff, small as it was, always had plenty of patients. Someone pregnant, someone ill, someone who’d sprained or broken or lost a limb. No one ever stopped to let their various injuries and illnesses heal properly.Grit your teethand press on.That was what the villagers believed. They’d gossiped about Charlotte’s mother for that very reason; she’d descended into grief rather than pushing through it. If one didn’t press on through whatever ills life threw at them, one would never get on at all. Who would pay the bills, mend the nets, cook the supper, repair the roof?
Although she knew bodies needed rest, Charlotte struggled not to feel that way herself. She knew of at least three medical crises she likely could’ve helped with had she not been laid up with her own illness for weeks. At the time, she’d barely cared, so sick she wasn’t sure she’d recover. Now she couldn’t stop thinking of them.
The sea was a violent provider. The cannery possibly even more so, as Charlotte was reminded late this afternoon by a factory worker whose hand was so lacerated as to be unsavable. He was fourteen and had smaller hands than the grown workers, so when a gang knives machine jammed up, he’d been told to stick his hand into it to fix the jam. The bosses had been loath to shut production down to examine the machine properly.
Anger simmered in Charlotte’s gut. The injury had been entirely preventable.
The hand had to come off. The boy’s work would slow, and probably he’d lose his job. He was unbearably cheerful about it, although she sensed an undercurrent of tension as she worked up toward telling him he would lose the hand. Seacliff hadn’t yet beaten him into the gruff, grim village man he would one day be, as all the village men were. All of them but Arthur, because he spent more time buried in books and his own head than reality.
Perhaps that was one of the reasons the villagers disliked him; he didn’t push through life’s ills so much as ignore them. Nonetheless, Charlotte sometimes envied him. Her best semblance of a defense against the realities of their lives wasdetermined practicality. It only worked until life wrenched control from her hands, reminding her that practicality could never overcome things like bosses who cared more for profit than people or the slow poisoning of the sea at the hands of the cannery and the distant, wealthy men who had built it.
Daydreaming couldn’t overcome those things, either, but it might have given her an occasional respite.
She did what needed to be done, bandaged the boy’s stump, and gave his mother instructions for his care, promising to return in the next few days to make sure it was healing. Then she headed home. She’d intended to make more house calls but couldn’t bear it after that one.
Leaning on her cane, she limped back through the village. Her father’s bone saw weighed heavy in her bag. Early evening sunlight unspooled in thin strands, weak, but it hurt her eyes. The hill loomed before her. The steps seemed impossibly steep.
Charlotte’s vision swam. She sat on a stump and cried, angry at the bosses, angry at herself for not being able to climb the hill alone, angry at Arthur for leaving her to her own devices. Angry at herself all over again, because she’d refused to tell him to stay, though he’d given her ample opportunity, and because she ought not to have needed him so deeply in the first place.
“You all right?”
A short, stocky person stood over her, dressed in a working man’s clothes: shirt, trousers, braces, and boots, with a cloak under their arm and knives at their belt. But it was a woman around Charlotte’s age, with tawny skin, black hair slung in a braid over her shoulder, and serious dark eyes.
“I’m fine.” Charlotte wiped her eyes on her apron. “I was taking a rest before heading uphill. That’s all.”
The woman rubbed her chin. “Sure of that, are you? Looked to me like you were weepin’.”
Charlotte’s fists clenched in her skirt. “I wasn’t.”
“No matter.” The woman shrugged. “C’mon, give me your arm.”
