Lighthouse Bay (6 page)

Isabella hears Meggy’s soft tones retreating. Isabella relaxes a little: she needs Meggy—who has uncannily sharp hearing—out of the saloon. Then, Arthur and the Captain resume their conversation. The constant unstopping of the bottle of claret, the clunk of their glasses on the polished wood. Every night after dinner, Arthur drinks with the Captain. And the Captain drinks a lot. The drunker they are, the louder their voices become.

She listens to them a long time. They talk about the weather, old friends, about Isabella. Arthur tells the Captain about the new house he intends to build on their return to England, and for a little while he sounds excited and happy. Isabella does not feel sorry for him. She does not want the new house, because Arthur’s mother will then move in with them. And if she is there, it is likely Percy will be there often, and Isabella never wants to see Percy again.

Eventually Arthur resumes his usual sour tone. “How well do you trust your crew?” he asks the Captain.

“Well enough. Why?”

“There are seventeen of them and they are a low sort of men. Can you be sure nobody is stealing anything from you?”

“They’d have nowhere to hide it, Winterbourne,” the Captain slurs, managing to find a sibilant consonant in every word.

One of Arthur’s chief concerns in life is that he will have something stolen from him. Several servants back in Somerset have been sacrificed to this fear. In fact, his whole family appears to share this unfounded fear: unfounded, for it has never happened to any of them, to her knowledge. Perhaps it is working with gems that does it to them: small, precious things that are easy to hide and transport. But Isabella has always thought it ghastly that people who have so much should be so fearful of losing a little of it.

“If one of them should think to touch the mace,” Arthur continues, and now Isabella realizes just how drunk he is. With his drunkenness, all his morbid thoughts come to light like frightened bats flying from a cave.

“Nobody’s going to touch your mace.”

“I’m wary,” he says. “I have the key on me, day and night.”

Isabella smiles, as she has the key in her hand at that very second. He pins it inside his waistcoat pocket, and his waistcoat is hung on the inside of their door just before supper every night. He hangs it, rolls up his shirt sleeves, washes his face and hands in the china dish by their beds, and thus the day is over and the night has commenced. Arthur is a man who revels in routines.

The Captain mutters something else to Arthur, and then they are off on another topic of conversation. She waits a few more moments, then decides if she waits too long Arthur will be beyond
drunk and want to fall into bed, so she quietly peels back the covers and climbs down the ladder.

A thing she has had to get used to on the ship is the constant lurching movement of the sea beneath her feet. So she stands, waits until she is sure of her footing, then goes to the door. There is no latch, so it tends not to stay properly closed. It is ajar an inch: enough to hear somebody approaching and to let in a little reflected lamplight from the saloon. Her pulse thuds dully in her ears. When she is certain they aren’t moving from the velvet seats to which their drunken backsides are glued, she moves back and crouches beside her husband’s bunk and feels underneath it for the walnut chest.

Her fingers find the brass handle on each end, and slowly, slowly, she begins to pull.

A sudden lurch as the ship pitches down a wave; the chest scrapes against the wooden floor and she overcompensates, falls backwards, fingers flying off the box. She falls inelegantly, and certainly not quietly.

“What is that?” Arthur says.

Isabella quickly clambers to her feet, shoving the walnut chest back under the bunk with her foot, securing it in place with her trunk, and then the door to the cabin is open and Arthur is eyeing her in the dark.

“Isabella?”

“I came down to get a drink of water, and fell from the lowest rung,” she says, gesturing to the ladder.

His eyes catch on her bare wrist, where the black ribbon has been. “Are you still unwell?” he says at last.

She nods. The key to the box burns a guilty hole in her palm.

“Go back to your bed. I’ll bring you water.”

And she can do nothing but go back to her bed. He returns
a few seconds later with a cup of water, which she drinks while he waits. The Captain appears at the door and says, “I’m off to bed now, Winterbourne.”

“Good night, Francis. I’ll do the same.”

No! Here is her plan foiled, and here is the wretched key still in her hand. How is she to return it to his waistcoat before he notices it missing, if he is here in the cabin with her?

Arthur undresses and bids her good night. With a grunt and a struggle, he climbs onto his bunk below her. She lies above him on her side, and waits for him to sleep so she can decide what to do.

Finally, the familiar trumpet of his snoring alerts her to his deep drunken sleep. She decides the only safe course of action is to climb down, slip the key back in his waistcoat pocket, then go back to bed and do it all another time.

Once more she peels back the sheets. Once more she climbs down the ladder. As her bare ankles pass his sleeping body, she shudders deeply, as one might when one walks past a snake.

And once her feet are on the floor, she no longer wants to put his wretched key back. Not yet. She stands next to him in the dark, and he doesn’t hear her. He doesn’t wake. A mad courage seizes her. She crouches and reaches under his bunk.

If he wakes, she will be discovered. She knows this, and still she does it.

Gently, she pulls the chest out until it touches her knees. The chest is narrow but three feet long, and she has to feel along its length for the five locks. In the dark, she fumbles with the key. An eternity stretches out between her finding each one, guiding the key into the lock, turning it with a soft snick. She barely breathes the whole time. There is no light in the gray room. She finds her way by touch.

Finally, she cracks the chest open. Two fine gold chains stop
the lid from falling all the way back and smacking into the floor. She lifts the layers of black velvet and sees the dull glint of the mace: gold, studded with precious gems. She carefully feels around in the chest for the edge of the velvet cushion on which the mace rests, eases up the corner, slips her precious black ribbon out of the front of her nightgown and tucks it under, then releases the cushion and closes the box.

Snap.

Too confident, she drops it the last half-inch. The noise seems impossibly loud in the dark. Her body ices over and she can’t move. Her heart thumps out of her chest; even her eyeballs seems to pulse. Arthur stops snoring, makes a grunting noise.

Then, slowly, rhythmically, he starts again. She has never been so glad to hear him snore. She almost laughs.

She feels around the box again for the locks. One by one, she fastens them. A kind of reckless certainty has gripped her. All will be well, so she takes her time, quietly pushes the mace under the bed, then slips the key into Arthur’s waistcoat.

Up the ladder. Into bed. She doesn’t sleep for hours and hours because the excitement takes forever to cool from her blood.

For now, Daniel’s bracelet is safe. It will at least get to the other side, Sydney, where Arthur is to hand the mace over to Mr. Barton on behalf of the Queen. Isabella anticipates more key-stealing and tiptoeing about before the ceremony, of course, but for the present she is simply glad that the black ribbon is not in danger of going overboard. The rest she can work out when she is finally off this stinking vessel.

T
he next few days are bleak. A black cloud descends on her. At first she thinks the darkness is caused by her not having the
bracelet around her wrist, and perhaps that is a little of the reason. But more likely it’s the weather, which has turned leaden and windy and rough.

The place to be, on a ship in stormy seas, is above deck. Below deck, without her eyes to find a horizon, the roiling seasickness can set in. So she spends hours every day up on the anchor deck, the voices of men shouting and swearing behind her, watching the gray sea and the gray sky and trying to stay clear of the rain under the canvas cover. Ordinarily, Meggy would have joined her, but Meggy avoids her now, preferring to mark the time embroidering in the saloon. Life goes on below deck, all the little mundane details of lived experience tick along, pushing time into lines. Above deck, with nothing in sight but endless sea, time stops and she is pitching and yawing through an eternal gray moment. It is like her sadness, this interminable journey. She sees no land, she can predict no end, all is storm-beaten.

And sometimes when the rain comes hammering hard, but never cold, and she has to shrink under the last dry space behind the ship’s wheel, she hears Mr. Harrow barking orders and she thinks about what Meggy told her. He lost his wife. And here he functions perfectly well. She would not be able to sail a ship. She would run it aground in her grief, surely. But, while the Captain fumbles through tasks, Mr. Harrow is calm and capable. Sometimes she steals glances at him, looking for the pain on his face, but she doesn’t see it. Then she realizes she is being as bad as Meggy, and she puts her face on her knees again and waits and waits, through time and distance and stormy seas.

T
hen the first gray light glimmers at the hem of the darkness.

Isabella sees Mr. Harrow in the galley. He, like her, is searching
for something to stop up the hunger until lunch. He crouches with his head in the cupboard.

When she says, “Good morning,” he startles and hits his head.

“I’m so sorry,” she says.

“It’s fine,” he replies, standing, rubbing his head. “Are you looking for food too?”

She nods. “I hid some dried apple in a tin at the back, behind the flour.”

He returns his attention to the cupboard, smiling. “Ah, very clever.” He pulls out the tin and attempts to prize off the lid. “Did you put this lid on yourself?” he says, with effort.

She laughs, spreading her palms apart. “My mother used to say I should have been born a boy. ‘Strong as a goat, wild as a blackbird.’” Remembering Mother’s old saying makes her instantly sad. She doesn’t feel strong and wild anymore.

He has the lid off now and is offering her the tin. She selects a handful of sliced apple. Mr. Harrow is about to slip past her on his way out when she stops him.

“Mr. Harrow, wait,” she says. She watches her hand on his forearm as though it isn’t her own. She didn’t realize she was going to speak to him, but a compulsion has seized her.

He waits, and a small stretch of time binds them together in expectation.

Then she says, “Meggy told me about your wife.”

And there it was: the raw pain that she has been so longing to see on his face. Finally, she has found somebody
who knows
. To her horror, the corners of her mouth curl up as though to smile. She pushes them down again.

But then the vulnerability in Mr. Harrow’s face is gone, hidden under a constructed expression of acceptance. “Yes, I did lose Mary. It was very difficult,” he says. “But life must go on.”

“Must it?”

Her question flummoxes him. He opens his mouth to speak, then doesn’t. Rather, he remains still with his lips slightly parted.

“My son, Daniel, died nearly three years ago,” she says in a rush. “He was fifteen days old. Born perfectly healthy, growing well. Then one morning my eyes opened late—too late in the morning, too bright—wondering why he hadn’t woken me. He hadn’t woken me because he was dead, Mr. Harrow. Dead and cold.” Here her voice breaks and she puts her hands to her mouth to stop up the tears. “Because I was out of my mind with my grief, my husband’s family saw to it that the child was buried without me in attendance. I didn’t even have a chance to say good-bye to him.”

“Oh, my dear Mrs. Winterbourne,” he says, and gently pulls her hands away from her face and holds them in his rough fingers. “It is terrible to lose a loved one, but the sun
will
shine again.”

“It cannot.” Now she doubts him. He has only lost a wife, not a child. What can he know about her pain?

Mr. Harrow searches for words. The ship rides over a bump and swell, setting the hanging spoons clanging against each other. Finally he says, “Such sadness doesn’t just bruise, then fade away. It devastates. The only way back is to rebuild, stone by stone. And sometimes one hasn’t the energy, or the inclination, and one sits among the ruins and waits for something to change. But nothing changes unless we stand up again, and keep picking up the stones.”

Her heart lightens and darkens over and over as he speaks: hope, despair, hope, despair, fast-moving clouds over the sun. He does understand, but he is telling her she has to try to get better. Does he not know that if she recovers from Daniel’s death, then she loses Daniel a second time? Recovering is a kind of forgetting.

But she has longed for the comfort of words such as Mr. Harrow’s and perhaps Mr. Harrow has longed for a fellow soul to
share his sorrow too, so they stand there for a moment together, hands clasped, tears brimming. And that’s when Meggy comes in.

“Oh,” she says, her pale eyes taking in their stance, their clasped hands, their searching eyes. At first Isabella does not understand the import: there is nothing romantic about the moment Mr. Harrow and she are sharing. But, by God, it looks like it.

Mr. Harrow, alarmed—for Isabella suspects he is sweet on Meggy—drops her hands and takes a step back, knocking his head on a hanging copper pan.

Isabella says, “Meggy, wait.” But Meggy has already turned and hurried off.

Mr. Harrow rubs his head. “I should go,” he says.

Isabella nods, and is left alone in the galley a few moments later, wondering when she will harvest the inevitable consequences.

D
inner is cooking in the galley, and the smell of stewing meat is trapped in the saloon where Isabella sits alone, working on her embroidery ring. She has made many mistakes this evening, and has spent so much time unpicking misplaced stitches that she may as well not have started work at all. Meggy is nowhere in sight. Isabella begins to hope, faintly, that Meggy has decided to keep to herself about the scene with Mr. Harrow. But the hope does not last, for at dusk Arthur thunders down the stairs and a moment later is standing in front of her, his brows drawn down so hard that they create grim shadows on his face. Isabella puts aside her embroidery ring and tries not to blink, or flinch, or indicate in any way that she knows what is coming.