Chapter 3
The detective Elara spoke to just moments ago was scarcely out of sight before she began to pack.
A different quiet settled when he was gone, that thin breathing-space that came between one danger and the next.
He’ll return. If not he, then another… I must leave.
She knew it the moment his horse passed beyond the bend in the road.
She wanted to go that very minute, but wanting and doing were never the same.
She had never left the lighthouse before, not beyond the narrow limits of the headland and the necessary errands that belonged to its keeping.
And then, there was Hugh. For all that he failed her, she couldn’t simply walk out and leave him as though it was nothing.
There was the child too, suddenly and terribly hers to think for, and she didn’t yet know how best to carry him on the road. She would have to pack, as well, and make herself ready, though her gut cried to be gone before the detective returned with more questions and less patience.
Elara crossed the kitchen without haste, though her pulse had begun to beat faster.
Hugh still sat at the table with his bottle near his hand and his eyes on nothing.
He had stirred a little when the detective was at the door, enough to listen, perhaps enough to understand, but not enough to matter.
She passed him and went into the back room.
The woman lay where Elara had left her, the stillness of death fully present now.
Elara fetched a clean sheet from the chest at the foot of the bed.
The linen was coarse but serviceable. She shook it out and spread it over the woman, but before she covered her completely, Elara looked at her face one last time.
The features had already begun to change, losing what little warmth they had held.
“I’ll see you properly buried,” she promised quietly.
When the sheet was secured, she slid her arms beneath the wrapped shape and moved it higher on the bed, away from the edge. The body was heavier than she expected; the stiffness of it set a prickle along her skin, a fine cold that rose up Elara’s arms and landed between her shoulders.
When she finally set the body where she wanted it, she stood again and turned to the child. The little boy was asleep in the small nest she had contrived from blankets and an old shawl-lined basket. His lashes lay dark against his cheeks.
Sleep gentled him. Waking, he had a grave look for one so little, as if he came into the world already mistrustful of it. Sleeping, he looked small as he actually was. Elara stood over him for the briefest moment, then grabbed the oilskin packet.
“Alright,” she murmured to herself, “let’s see what we have here.”
She set the packet on the table beneath the window where the light was best, though the morning was a dull one and the sky still wore the bruised remains of the storm.
Her fingers were careful as she unwound the cord.
The packet had dried some by the hearth, but not enough to save what the sea had already damaged.
The papers smelled of salt and mildew and old ink.
Some had stuck together, but she eased them with patience.
Several pages were ruined beyond sense. There were black streaks where words had been, and half a signature at the bottom of the page. Elara couldn’t read the name as it was all blurred into ghosts.
“This is worthless,” she frowned and laid those papers aside. “Let’s move on.”
The first legible paper was a marriage certificate. Elara bent closer.
“Isabelle… Crane,” she finally managed to discern the letters, “...to Victor… Rathburn.”
The writing had spread at the edges, but the names remained clear enough. The date was three years prior. The seal had partly dissolved, yet enough of it remained to prove it official.
Victor Rathburn…That’s the same name the detective had mentioned.
Elara reached for the next paper. It was a will, or part of one.
The upper half had suffered most, and the lower corner was gone altogether, but the body of it could still be followed if one tried hard enough.
It named a child, Theodore Rathburn, as sole heir to Isabelle Rathburn’s personal estate.
The legal wording tangled and blurred in places, but not enough to hide its meaning.
Elara’s gaze moved of its own accord toward the sleeping basket.
She looked back at the page and read the lines one more time, and slower.
There was no mistake. The dead woman hadn’t come ashore clutching some common foundling.
She had dragged herself half out of the sea with an heir in her arms and papers to prove it.
The next page was a letter. The handwriting was smaller and evidently more hurried than the clerk’s neat lettering on the certificate. Luckily, the address at the top was clear enough. Aldous Fenn, Harrow. The signature at the bottom had run, but not wholly. Nell Burrows. Dated three weeks prior.
Elara read what she could. Much of it was lost where the ink had bled into feathery stains, but certain fragments held.
...if anything should happen...
...the child must not remain in his father’s house...
...she feared him before the end...
...you are the only one I dare trust...
That was all she could read. Elara folded the letter back and started putting the pieces together. Those were nothing but fragments, yet they all pointed one way.
Nell hadn’t been fleeing with a stolen child,” Elara whispered to herself. “She was carrying him out of danger.”
Only then did she think again of the detective. Indeed, Elara had noticed his eyes first, hazel, sharp, and wholly awake.
The man wasn’t handsome in any vain or polished fashion, though there were women who would have called him so, mostly because of his broad shoulders and dark hair kept short, maybe even because of the face cut in firm lines, clean-shaven, with a mouth that looked as if it had forgotten how to smile except on rare occasion.
There had been a scar on his left hand, and Elara had found herself wondering where he got it.
“That’s a foolish thing to notice,” she scoffed. “And even more foolish to remember.”
Yet she remembered all of it.
The packet lay open before her, a little heap of half-drowned truth. Elara put one palm flat upon the table and breathed, deep and slow. I have hours, at most… maybe even fewer.
If the detective had any wit, he would turn that neat mind of his back toward the house before noon. If he had less wit than she feared, then he would at least speak to someone in Harrow, or wire whoever paid him, and the next knock upon the door would come from worse hands.
She began gathering what she would need.
First, she packed a change of linen for herself, then two of the child’s makeshift wraps, fashioned from old soft cloth cut down years ago for dusting and never used.
In the kitchen, where her father sat unconscious of another emptied bottle of liquor, she found the tin for warming milk, the last of the dried bread, and a heel of cheese.
Back in the room, she grabbed a small purse with the coins she had kept hidden in the blue crock behind the pantry wall, hoarded penny by penny against a need. Finally, she took the packet she wrapped again in oilskin and tucked it deep among the things.
Then she went back into the kitchen.
“Pa,” she said. “Pa… wake up.”
After a few shakes, the man looked up slowly with red-rimmed eyes. “Mm?” he managed.
“I need the horse and wagon made ready by morning,” she said. “For Harrow. At first light.”
He stared another moment, as if her words had to cross a long stretch of water to reach him. Elara kept looking at him until he fell asleep again.
“Forget it,” she murmured. By morning he would either still be sleeping over the table or sunk into that leaden stupor that came after drinking, and she would be left to pull sense from the wreckage of his intentions as she always had.
She went out to the shed before dusk and checked the harness herself.
One strap needed stitching. She fetched the awl and worked by lamplight.
The wagon wheel seemed sound enough, though the left rim had warped some from damp.
The horse, old Bess, lifted her head and snorted softly when Elara came near.
Elara rubbed the mare’s neck and looked at the shafts and the narrow track of road leading south through the trees.
“A wagon would be slower,” she thought out loud. “Slower and louder… Easier to follow, too. And with Hugh in charge of preparing it, a fantasy besides.”
By the time she walked back to the house, she had already abandoned the idea.
“I’ll just go on foot,” she decided, and entered the house.
Inside, Elara lit another lamp. She cooked a meal for Hugh because otherwise he wouldn’t eat. He took the plate without thanks; she didn’t have time to see whether he touched it.
In the back room, the child woke hungry.
Elara gathered him into her arms and warmed what milk she could contrive for him.
He fussed until she drew him close, and then quieted all at once, as though her hold had been what he was seeking from the first. A moment later his little hand fastened in the front of her dress with surprising force.
Elara looked down at him while he ate and felt that strange tightening in her chest again, sudden and unwelcome. That’s no affection... It’s just something I ought to do. This child needs me, and I ought to help him.
As though in answer, his grip slackened, then tightened again, clumsy and insistent.
At some point, while being fed, he stopped eating and made a small, satisfied sound and turned his face into her, pressing his cheek against the hollow of her collar as if he meant to express his gratitude, then turned back toward the tin. Elara stilled.
“You’re a charming little thing aren’t you,” she murmured, softer than she intended. “You don’t mean to let go, do you?”