Prologue #3
“He is not coming back, Lucy,” Mama said. Very gentle. As if she were laying something broken into Lucy’s lap. “Uncle Henry is not coming back.”
The room stayed still. She had thought it might spin or that she might faint the way they did in novels, but it did not. She sat exactly where she was, with the tassels of her shawl gripped in her right hand and the onion smell climbing the walls, and stared at the coals in the grate.
Uncle Henry had told her once about a storm off the Cape of Good Hope.
He had lain on the drawing room carpet and rocked his shoulders to show the pitch of the deck and described the mainmast breaking like God clearing His throat.
She had laughed so hard, she had to hide her face in the cushion so as not to be vulgar.
He had said at the end that the sea was not to be feared exactly. To fear it was to give it more credit than it deserved. What the sea wanted was respect. What it wanted was for a man to know he was small and to sail small, and if he did that, the sea would let him keep going most of the time.
Most of the time.
From somewhere far away, she heard a dry sound and realized it was her own voice trying to speak.
“The ship went down a week ago?”
“Yes, my love. That is what we understand. The Lady’s Grace was seen striking the rocks off Land’s End on Thursday evening in a gale that lasted through the night. There were some fragments recovered. But no …” Papa’s voice failed him, and he pressed a hand to his mouth.
Mama held her tighter. She was crying. Lucy had not noticed until now. Her mother’s tears were running down her cheeks.
“There are no survivors, Lucy,” Mama whispered. “None at all.”
The clock in the hall began to strike. It could not be another hour yet. Nine had struck when the world was still a place where Uncle Henry was alive and on his way to her.
You are wrong, she thought. Not out loud. She could not have said it out loud. But under her ribs, something hot and fierce had caught and was burning.
You are wrong. You do not know. He might have jumped clear before she struck.
He might have swum. He might have been picked up by another ship.
He might have made it to shore somewhere and been laid up in a cottage with no way to send word.
He might be walking up the drive this very minute, and any second the bell will ring and it will be him.
She stared at the drawing room door.
The door stayed shut.
The clock finished striking and the room held its breath, and Papa lowered himself at last into the wing chair across from her and put his elbows on his knees and his face into his hands.
Her father was weeping. Her father who had never wept in front of her, not even when his own mother died, was weeping into his hands like a boy and his shoulders were shaking, and Mama was holding Lucy so hard it hurt.
It cannot be true. If it were true, my father would not be weeping like this. My father does not weep. Therefore, it is not true.
But her father was weeping.
She wished with a sudden sharp fierceness that she had never come downstairs.
She wished she were still upstairs at her dressing table with her shelf of treasures, before the messenger, before the bell had rung. She wished she could go back to eight o’clock when the frost was still on the glass and Uncle Henry was still coming and the whole day was still ahead.
But time did not turn back. Uncle Henry had said so once, standing on the drawing room rug with a glass of Papa’s brandy in his hand and the firelight on his face. He had said it lightly, but she had noticed because he never said light things that were not serious underneath.
“Time is a river, poppet. You may sit on the bank and watch, or you may get in and swim. But you shall not turn it back. Better to swim.”
Lucy swallowed.
Her voice when she found it was small and came from a long way away, as if she were listening to a stranger speak.
“He might not be dead.”
Mama made a broken sound in her throat.
“He might not,” Lucy said again. “The sea is a large place. He might have—”
“Lucy.” Papa had lifted his face from his hands. His eyes were wet but he was Papa again, and Papa knew things and Papa did not say what he did not know. “Lucy, my dear one. He is gone. It has been more than a week. If he had come ashore, we would have heard of it before now. He is gone.”
Her gaze drifted from her father to her mother, then past them both to the firmly closed drawing room door. His carriage would never draw up outside again, nor would a laughing gentleman in a mud-spattered greatcoat burst through it with that beloved, irrepressible joy.
Then Lucy Carroway buried her face in her mother’s neck and wept.
But somewhere down under the weeping, down where the hot coal of stubborn hope still burned and would not go out, a thought had lodged itself and would not be moved by tears or by any pronouncement from the Naval Office or by any words her father might say.
They had not found him.
They had found fragments of the ship.
They had found no body.
The sea was a large place.
And she would not believe that Uncle Henry was dead.