Chapter 1 #2
Elara pushed forward. The woman’s hair clung dark and heavy to her face.
Her dress was torn and soaked through, the once fine, city-made fabric dragged thin against bone.
One arm clutched a small, struggling bundle.
The other held tight to an oilskin packet, fingers locked around it with a strength that had outlasted reason.
The woman parted her lips as if to say something the moment she saw Elara approaching her, but the word broke apart in her mouth.
Another wave struck. Elara tore the child free first. The boy was small, no more than a year and a half, and soaked through, his little body stiff with cold and terror.
His cries cut against her ear as she tucked him beneath her shawl and bound him there as tightly as she could with one end of the wet wool.
“You’re safe now,” she muttered. “You’re safe.”
Then she turned back to the woman.
The packet she kept holding didn’t come loose easily.
Elara pried it free finger by finger and shoved it into the crook of her arm.
After that there was nothing for it but the hard way.
She caught the woman under the shoulders and dragged her up the rocks a few feet at a time, bracing her boots where she could, stopping whenever the sea surged high enough to tug them backward again.
Twice she had to let the woman slide and snatch at the child to make certain he was still secure against her, and twice she bent herself over both of them and waited for the water to pass.
After she had hauled the woman above the worst of the wash, her arms were shaking.
Though despite of it all, Elara dragged the woman to the shelter of the path, went back for the lantern she had nearly lost, then returned and pulled her farther, one rough stretch at a time, the child pressed screaming against her chest.
By the time they reached the top, Elara’s breath came raw and tearing, and her arms burned from shoulder to wrist, but she kept placing one step before the next.
The door gave out under her shoulder.
“Hugh,” she called, not expecting an answer.
He stirred at the table, slow and heavy, his head lifting as she crossed the room. “Elara…”
His gaze found the woman and the child, the water still dripping from them onto the floor. Hugh pushed himself half upright, one hand reaching out.
“Where…”
But he never finished the sentence. His strength gave. He fell back into the chair with a dull, final thud.
Elara watched him only long enough to know he would not rise again. Then she took a blanket from the back of his chair and quickly set it over him and turned away.
The child didn’t know how to be still. He cried until the sound broke in his throat, small fists striking blindly. Elara stripped the wet cloth from him, wrapped him in dry linen, and settled him against her shoulder.
“There,” she murmured, pressing the pad of her finger to his mouth. He took it and started sucking it hard, desperate for something solid. “That’s it…”
The boy’s cries softened and soon, Elara laid him close to the fire and turned back to the woman.
Up close, the damage was clearer. Fever burned through her. Her skin was hot and dry despite the sea. Her breath came shallow and uneven. Whatever strength had carried her this far had already spent itself.
Elara knelt beside her. “Stay with me,” she said, almost demanding. “What’s your name?”
The woman’s eyes opened. They were unfocused, searching. “Ne… Nell,” she whispered.
“Nell what?” Elara insisted.
But the rest was lost.
Elara leaned closer. “Where have you come from?”
Nell’s hand seized her wrist with sudden strength. “Listen,” she said, the word dragged raw from her throat. “You must…”
“What?” Elara tried to gain as much information as possible. “I must what?”
“They’ll come.”
“Who will come?” Elara kept asking. “Nell, please. Stay with me. Talk to me. Who will come?”
But the answer would not hold. The words came broken and fever-thin, slipping apart almost as soon as they were spoken.
Again and again through the long night, Nell clutched at Elara’s arm and tried to make herself understood, but most of it was no more than fragments, possible names, warnings half-formed and gone before Elara could catch them.
Hours passed in that fashion, with the fire sinking low and the storm grinding on outside, until Elara had nearly ceased trying to make sense of any of it. Then, sometime in the blackest stretch before dawn, Nell’s hand tightened sharply on her wrist and one name came clear at last. “Aldous… Fenn.”
The name came clear.
Elara stilled. “Where?”
“Harrow,” Nell whispered. “Find… him…”
“And the child?” Elara asked.
Nell’s gaze shifted, dragging itself toward the small bundle by the fire. Her hand tightened. “Hide him,” she said. “Hide… Theodore."
Then, all of a sudden, Nell’s hand fell slack. Stillness followed and morning came quiet. The storm had passed as though it had never been, and pale light slipped through the window, thin and uncertain. The sea lay stretched and distant, its violence spent.
Elara sat in the chair by the hearth. The child slept against her chest, his breath warm through the worn wool of her mother’s shawl. One small hand had closed in the fabric, holding without knowing what it held. Across the room, Hugh lay slumped in his chair, the blanket still over him.
Finally, at her feet, Nell didn’t move. Elara waited, then slowly reached for her, not willing to wake up the child. Her fingers found the place where a pulse should be, but there wasn’t any. Elara held there a moment, hoping she was mistaken, then gradually withdrew her hand and sat back.
“Dear Lord…” she whispered, leaning back against her chair.
The oilskin packet rested on the table. Elara looked at it, then at the child.
“Aldous Fenn,” she said quietly. “From Harrow…”
The name meant nothing. The child shifted in his sleep, pressing closer, and Elara adjusted her hold without thinking.
“There, there, little one…” She didn’t dare to call him by the name the woman had given because names had a way of fastening themselves to things. And Elara had learned, long ago, what came of that.
She sat quietly as the light grew, alone in the small, quiet room, with a child she didn’t know, a packet she hadn’t yet opened, and a name that had arrived out of the storm like a question without an answer.
“What have you brought me?” she asked the sleeping child, not expecting a reply.
Instead, the lighthouse answered in its own manner. It turned through the thinning dark and into the colorless light of morning, its beam fading where it was no longer needed, and held all the same.
Chapter 2
The following day
The road south along the Oregon coast was scarcely a road at all in places, only a stubborn line of mud and stone cut between the sea and the dark rise of the timber. Jasper Rede had been on worse paths, but not often with less company; that day, he was on his own.
The morning had come in grey and raw after the storm, with the clouds hanging low enough to make a man feel the whole sky had dropped nearer the earth in the night.
Jasper’s horse picked carefully through the worst of the washout. Water still ran in the ruts, thin and brown, and the wind carried the sharp smell of wet cedar and salt. Far to his right, beyond the bluff, the sea moved in long, sullen swells.
Jasper kept his collar turned up and his thoughts where they belonged, which was to say on the case file in his coat pocket and the sum Victor Rathburn, the railroad magnate, had agreed to pay upon its successful conclusion.
A missing child and a servant fled. Documents taken from the household in the same breath as the boy.
That had been the outline given him in Portland, neat as ink upon paper.
The child’s mother, Rathburn had said, was dead these past months, taken by a fever, and the household hadn’t been the same ever since.
A regrettable domestic disturbance elevated by the standing of the family involved. Rathburn’s representatives hadn’t cared to call it a kidnapping, not in so many words, but that was what the job was and everyone in the room had known it.
Recover the child, demanded Rathburn. Recover any papers removed with him… and avoid public noise.
The last instruction had been delivered with particular emphasis, as though the greater danger lay not in the taking of the boy but in the possibility of respectable people hearing of it.
Jasper had accepted the case because it was a well-paid job, there was no romance in it. His mother’s medical bills had arrived with a regularity that suggested a personal dislike, and the agency, for all its faults, remained the only steady arrangement he had.
Still, the neatness of the story had sat oddly with him from the first. A child, not yet two years old, had gone missing, yet Rathburn had spoken of the papers almost as much as of the boy.
It wasn’t enough to refuse the offer, though. At twenty-eight and with a widowed mother, Jasper wasn’t in a position to refuse straightforward money because a wealthy man’s household had the wrong smell about it. But it certainly was enough to make him read the file twice .
He drew the horse to a slower pace where the road curved inland around a rise of rock and scrub.
The trees suddenly thinned; the line cut across the clearing just beyond, iron dark with damp.
And there, by the bend where the repaired section joined the older rail, lay the place where the Harrow crash had happened seven years ago that November.
Eleven dead. That was the number the inquiry settled on. Among them was Everett Rede, twenty-two years old. He was three months into his first railroad job.