Lighthouse Bay Page 7

  “Quickly, Arthur!” she shouts. She looks around for the Captain, for Meggy, for anyone. Perhaps there are people still taking the last lifeboat off the prow.

  Arthur lowers their lifeboat and by some miracle they are now both in it and bobbing on the shallow water over the reef. Arthur takes one oar and Isabella the other and they push themselves into deep water, the walnut chest between them. The waves want to keep carrying them back towards the ship, which Isabella can now see has broken in half. She thinks about her jewelry back on board, but cannot feel sorry for its loss. If she lives, she will think herself lucky. If Daniel’s coral bracelet survives too, she will think herself rich beyond measure.

  Then Arthur half-stands to get his oar against a rock and push away. A wave catches their little boat and he tips into the water.

  “Arthur!” Isabella screams. His oar is still sticking out of the water, so she grasps it. He holds the other end tightly, swallowing water and struggling.

  “Pull, you useless woman, pull!” he screams.

  “I am pulling!”

  But then the water is over his face and, pull as she might, she cannot bring him closer. Suddenly, the force is reversed, and she realizes he is pulling her. If he is going to drown, he will take her with him. But before she can register this properly and drop the oar, it flips up. Light. Arthur is gone.

  Isabella feels her own lightness, her own lack of substance. Her death is just over there, an arm’s-length away. A swelling wave beneath her lifts the lifeboat, and pushes it away from the ship. She surfs down it, shouting with fear, unable to hear herself over the storm.

  But now she can see land, and she starts to row.

  In spite of the mad currents.

  In spite of the rocks.

  Because in the chest is the last memory of her son.

  She rows. Through the black water. Through the storm. Through the pelting icy needles of rain. For Daniel.

  Seven

  Isabella focuses on one task at a time, because to think of anything beyond the immediate present is to feel searing terror. She must seek shelter, but beyond the vast empty beach is a dark tangle of spiny trees that are black and nightmarish in the dark. The sight of them makes her stomach turn to water. Instead, she drags the lifeboat up the beach to a rocky shelf protruding from the white sand. Once, twice, she heaves. On the third attempt, her arms burning, she manages to flip the boat over. One side becomes wedged against the rock and she crawls underneath it for shelter, tucking the walnut box with the mace in it against her body.

  The rain hammers on the bottom of the boat. She curls into a ball. A gap between boat, rock and sand, only a foot at its highest point, keeps her from being in perfect airless dark. The sea roars and crashes. She waits for the others to come. Her body shivers uncontrollably: cold from the rain and sea, colder from the fear and shock. Nobody comes. Her eyes are fixed on the water. No other boats. No brave swimmers. Nobody.

  Arthur doesn’t come. Nor Meggy. Nor Captain Whiteaway. Nor Mr. Harrow.

  The black night lightens to gray after an hour or so. Dawn is not far away. Where are they? They are taking a long time to get from the wreck to the shore.

  Under the boat, she waits.

  The rain and wind ease a little, but it is still too stormy to leave her shelter. She remains on her side in the sand, eyes fixed on the sea, while weak daylight struggles through the clouds. And still nobody comes.

  Around the middle of the day, the rain stops. Isabella crawls out from under the boat to stretch her legs, and finds they can barely support her weight. She sits on the sand. She cries. The tears blur her vision as she surveys the world around her. Will anyone know she is here? Will there be a rescue ship? Isabella doesn’t know how such things work. But she fears that there will be no rescue ship. She sits on a vast beach, looking out at a bay shaped like a cauldron. Out there somewhere, in the storm-tossed water, is her husband. He is dead. They are all dead. A chill spreads through her veins. She struggles to her feet and forces her legs to work. She paces the sand, muttering, “They are all dead,” over and over, to see if the thought will sink in and become more ordinary.

  They are all dead.

  She walks to the edge of the water, lifts her skirts and wades in up to her waist. The water is warmer than the air. She relieves herself, a flush of shame on her cheeks even though there is not a soul around to witness it. Then she returns to the beach, to the shelter of her upturned boat. That is enough for today. Her stomach grumbles: she is hungry but has no appetite. She will worry about food tomorrow. For the rest of the day she lies in the sand under the boat. More rain moves in. Exhaustion finally catches her. At dusk, she sleeps.

  Isabella wakes to see the rain has cleared. The dawn sky is smudged by only a few purple-edged clouds. There will be sun. The thought lightens her mood, but only temporarily, for the night has brought something else to the beach.

  Bodies.

  At first her heart leaps, and she thinks they are sleeping. But as she walks towards them, it becomes apparent that the angle at which the two men are heaped upon each other is unnatural. Their legs are tossed by the waves running onto the shore.

  Isabella turns sharply and walks back in the other direction. She doesn’t want to know if they are her friends or simply crewmen. She feels the great emptiness inside her. She crawls under her boat and sobs for hours.

  But now she knows it is time to leave.

  As well as the bodies, pieces of wreckage have washed up along the beach. She picks through it, looking for anything that might be of use. There is nothing. Splintered wood. No bottles or barrels of food, no clothes or shoes. She glances over at the bodies again, but quickly looks away. She won’t steal clothes off corpses. Isabella’s eyes go to the mouth of the cove. If she walks up to the tip of the headland, she will be able to see better where she is. There may be a town. The thought cheers her. She may see houses.

  She may see endless beach hemmed by spiny forest.

  Isabella breathes deeply. First she must get Daniel’s bracelet out of the chest.

  Around her upturned boat, rocks of varying sizes lie in random patterns. Isabella chooses one and pulls the chest out from under the boat. She takes aim and smacks the rock against the lock, and the impact shudders up her arms and into her shoulders. The imprinted brass decorative clasp pops off, but the lock doesn’t break. Her husband’s fear of thieves has made him use sturdy locks, firmly screwed from inside and out.

  Isabella wonders if she is a thief, as she rips off the bottom of her petticoat and twists it into a rope. She threads the rope through the brass handle and stands, pulling the box behind her.

  She trudges through the sand. The sun is high and hot. She stops, takes off her remaining petticoat and wraps it around her head like a long scarf, pulling a few inches of the white cotton forward to shelter her face. Then she picks up her rope and walks again. The sand squeaks against her feet. The rhythm of the sea times her footfalls: five steps as it draws, five steps as it surges. She comes to the base of the long arm that shelters the bay and scrambles up, yanking the walnut box up behind her. Long, tough grass covers the ground and prickles her feet. The trees she can see hemming the beach are shades of gray and olive. She is sideswiped by a sudden longing to be back in England, where the sunshine is gentle and the trees are dark green, where she had shoes and knew what would happen next.

  She marches on, up the headland. The sun peaks, then goes over, changing the shadows of the grass on the sand. Then, finally, she is at the tip of the headland. She dares not look yet. There is a rock with a shallow pool. It is too high to be full of sea water, so she knows it is rainwater. She drinks it, even though it is gritty. She wishes she had collected water yesterday when it rained, then acknowledges she had nothing to collect it in.

  She lays down the box, stands tall and bravely looks. Back to the north first. Nothing. Countless miles of sand, a headland in the distance, obscured by sea mist. Now she looks south. More nothing. More sea mist. Mo
re green-blue ocean, roaring and wild beyond the shelter of the bay.

  Endless. Endless.

  She feels her smallness. She feels the immensity of the world. She feels the silent indifference of God. She feels the power of the ocean and her own limp weakness. Isabella’s knees buckle beneath her. She lowers herself to the spiky grass, and it pokes her through her dress. She puts her forehead on her knees and wishes, fervently, that she had died like all the others.

  She sits like that for a long time, heart thudding in her ears, the ocean crashing all around her, longing for small, quiet places and shelter and food. Then she lifts her head. She cannot sit here forever, for she will surely die. To the north there are clouds. They may turn into storm clouds. The ship was heading south, so there must be something to the south. Achingly distant, perhaps hundreds of miles. But there is something there, and so that is where she must go. She cannot stay where there is nothing. Her stomach already gurgles with hunger and the sun is drying all the rainwater. She is too frightened to go through the trees: just looking at them makes her flinch. So she will head south along the beach.

  She wants to cry, but crying will avail her nothing. Crying didn’t bring Daniel back. Crying won’t save his bracelet or give her a way to New York to find her sister. She stands, grabs the petticoat rope and clambers down the other side of the grassy verge and back onto smooth, bare sand. And she walks, dragging the walnut box behind her. Better to walk in the cool of evening and rest during the hottest part of the day. She walks until the stars come out, thousands of them glittering in foreign patterns in the black sky. She walks until midnight chases the last of the heat off the land. She walks until her feet and legs feel like liquid, and then she heads up to the edge of the spiny forest and lies down in the sand to sleep.

  Isabella realizes she has never felt hunger before. She has felt the faint gnawing of an empty stomach before breakfast, perhaps. But hunger is more encompassing than that. It makes her innards feel raw. The sun is hot when she wakes and she knows it is suicide to move while it is up. She is less fearful of the forest now, and goes in a little way for the meager shade. Here, there is still rainwater caught in puddles, so she can at least wet her mouth so it doesn’t feel like cloth. Even with the shade over her face, her skin is growing cracked and dry from the salt and the wind and the reflection off the sea. Her hands are pink with sunburn and raw from dragging the heavy chest. She turns them over in front of her face, wondering where her wedding ring is now.

  With all her other jewelry, in the silk box, at the bottom of the ocean. Only a few short days ago, she was counting it out, planning her escape, writing her list. All of it has washed away.

  She sits, grasps her knees and leans forward, trying to get comfortable on the sand and leaf fall. But her stomach is aching and she needs to eat. Anything. She looks behind her. The trees are dense. If this were England she’d know where to go looking for wild blueberries or a peach tree. The thought of fruit makes her mouth water. She rises, leaving the chest for now. There is nobody nearby to steal it. She makes her way a little into the trees, twigs scratching her arms. She is overwhelmed by an intense, foreign smell, sour and pungent. These trees and bushes look as though they could never bear fruit. Everything seems barren, dried out, starving itself.

  She freezes at a slithering sound in the bushes, and backs away. A snake? Or something worse? She heads back to the chest, sits with it and tries not to think about food or water.

  Isabella knows, of course, that the Winterbournes will come to look for the mace. She wants to be rid of it, so she can be free of them. Especially free of Percy. She is already plunged too deep in horror to imagine what he would do if he found that she had it. She spends the hottest part of the day trying again and again to prize open the chest. She uses rocks and sticks and sharp-edged shells. She crushes one of her fingertips. It goes blue, but the chest is still closed. The key is in her husband’s pocket. Perhaps he is washed up on the shore by now, or perhaps he is deep in the ocean. Once she reaches civilization, she can open it. The box is only wood, after all. She must borrow tools and open the chest and get Daniel’s bracelet out. Then somehow she must get to a port that sails to New York. The Winterbournes will think her dead, and not come after her. She is free, as long as she can survive and as long as she can rid herself of the wretched mace.

  The shadows grow long and she stands and begins to walk again. She is slower today: four footfalls for every draw and every wash of the waves. Hunger makes her weak, but just before dark she sees ahead that brown creek water has carved a furrow in the sand. She trudges up the beach and into the woods, bends at the side of the stream and scoops handfuls into her mouth. The heavy rain has made the creek run fast and full. The water has a strange mineral taste, but she doesn’t care. She drinks until her stomach aches. She decides to spend the night and next morning here, where she can hear the running water and know she will not die of thirst. The ground cover is soft. She lies for a long time without sleeping, blinking up at the foreign stars through the spiny leaves.

  Hunger prompts Isabella awake the next dawn. Her feet are raw, her hands are blistering, but all she can feel is hunger. She is not a woman anymore, just a vast ache. She must find food. She knows she must be brave and go deeper into the woods.

  With weak and shaking fingers, she winds the chest in the petticoat rope and straps it to her back, tying knots and adjusting it over her shoulders. She has seen drawings of native women carrying children like this. She moves slowly, following the creek, picking her way over rocks and twigs and marshy leaf fall. The foliage is thick, but she manages to find a narrow, sandy path. She hears strange birds and longs for blackbirds.

  Then, movement from the corner of her eye. She flinches, turning her head to see a large gray-brown lizard with its legs wrapped around a narrow tree trunk. It looks at her; she looks at it.

  Along with her fear and revulsion is the realization that if she can catch it and cook it, she can eat it.

  But its big claws look sharp and she hesitates long enough for it to scamper farther up the tree and onto a branch. Now Isabella can only see its tail, and she wishes she had been more decisive because her stomach is roaring with hunger and she feels weak and dizzy.

  She looks behind her. The trees have closed out the view of the beach, but she can still hear the ocean and knows she can find her way back.

  Farther into the forest? But why? What does she hope to find? Despair seizes her, but she doesn’t fall to her knees, she doesn’t pound her head against a tree. She keeps trudging, bruising the soles of her feet on rocks and fallen twigs. Her eyes are searching all the time. She doesn’t know what is edible and what isn’t. Now she sees a shrub with curling yellow flowers and egg-shaped berries. Several of the berries have fallen on the ground. Isabella bends to pick one up, and turns it over in her fingers. What if it’s poison?

  If it’s poison, she dies quickly, rather than slowly.

  Isabella eats the sweet, green berry. Her teeth grind against a seed, which she spits out. She eats all the fallen fruit, then picks more off the shrub. The ones she picks are hard and sour. She goes farther into the forest, looking for more fallen fruit. Her stomach howls. There is no way a handful of berries can satisfy her, but at least she is eating something.

  The sun is growing warm in the sky now, and she can’t bear the trickling sweat under her breasts. Her back is aching, so she unties the chest and rests it between dark tree roots. She sits on it, trying to keep her sunburned hands in the patchy shade.

  Movement in the undergrowth, something white flashing. Isabella peers warily, then stands and moves to it. It is a seagull: injured or old, flapping one of its wings, unable to fly or move away from her.

  Instinct overrides everything. She hasn’t eaten anything but berries in four days. She looks for a rock, finds one and, screwing her eyes half-shut, brings it down on the bird’s light skull. It stops struggling.

  Isabella’s stomach flips over at the thought of what
she has done. She has never killed anything, and in her weak, vulnerable state, her heart wrings for the gull, for its struggle for life, for its ghastly death. She crouches next to its mangled corpse, her hands in her hair, and sobs. The sobs crack the fresh sea air, they thunder through the spiny woods, they sink into the ground and make it shake.

  Hunger reminds her she must stop crying. She must get on. She picks up the bird by its feet and rests it gently on the chest, refusing to look directly at it. She has seen Cook pluck and gut a bird, so she knows roughly what to do. But she has never started a fire. She concentrates on one task at a time. She finds stones to make a pit, finds kindling, finds a couple of good dry sticks to rub together. There is blood on her hands and she tells herself not to be squeamish, that blood is always part of eating. It is spilled regularly in kitchens across the world. She rubs the sticks, she rubs the sticks, she rubs the sticks. Nothing happens. She tries again. She sits back on her haunches and lets out a shout of frustration that tears her throat. She rubs the sticks. Where is the fire? Where is the damned fire?

  A noise. She startles, whirls around.

  A dog. No, a wolf. Something between a dog and a wolf stands on the other side of the chest. She sees it, sees her dead seagull and lurches forward.

  The wild dog also lurches. Its jaws open wide to pick up the seagull just as Isabella’s hands touch its soft feathers. The wild dog doesn’t hesitate. It drops the bird and fastens its strong, sharp jaws on her hand. Isabella screams. Hot, pulling pain. She tries to pull back, but the wild dog has her hand. She brings around her other hand, forms a fist and punches the wild dog’s head. It drops her, she leaps backwards, and the dog is gone—with the dead gull in its mouth.

  “No!” she shrieks. “No, no, no!” Blood trickles from her wounded hand; the shape of the beast’s mouth is perfectly reproduced on her sunburned skin. She pulls the petticoat off her head and wraps her hand in it to stop the blood flowing. The emptiness inside, the emptiness outside. Everything is empty. She slumps heavily over the chest and cannot move.