Chapter 14
Chapter Fourteen
Evangeline
We went out to the rock this afternoon, and I find that I have been sitting with my pen over this page for some minutes without setting anything down, which is not a difficulty I have had before.
The rock has a proper name upon the charts and no one on this island has used it in my lifetime.
The men have a name of their own for it, which Thomas will not say in my hearing and which I have known since I was nine years old, and I have determined not to write it here, on the grounds that this book may well outlive my dignity.
He had business at the north end and I had an afternoon at my disposal and a mother who believes I was with the Ashworths.
I will not pretend that this arrangement came about by accident.
I saw to it on Tuesday, and considered it for three days afterward, and told myself the whole of the way down the hill that I was going out to look at the water.
It is nine days since my father told me I am to be married. I set that down because it is the only explanation I have for my conduct this afternoon, and because I would rather write it myself than have it discovered later by somebody less charitable.
The tide was lower than I have ever seen it. The entire eastern face of the rock stood exposed to the weed line, black and streaming, and there was a seam in it that I should have sworn upon my life had never been there before.
A fissure, and a narrow one. I was obliged to turn sideways and go in with my back against the one wall and my hands flat upon the other, and I did so before Thomas could tell me not to, and I heard him say my name behind me in the tone that men reserve for horses.
And then the rock opened.
I do not know how to render this properly, and I have made three attempts at it, and every word I reach for arrives too small for the purpose.
A chamber. Vaulted, with the ceiling somewhere above us in the dark and beyond any guessing at, and the floor dry sand and shale, and the light coming in behind us through that seam in a single blade that fell upon the far wall and lit it green.
As great as a ballroom, and I believe greater.
I stood in the middle of it and turned entirely around and could not discover the edges.
Thomas came through after me and stopped and said nothing whatever for a considerable while, which from him amounts to a speech.
Then he shouted.
There was no word in it. Only the sound. It went up into that darkness and came back at us three times over, and he laughed, and I shouted, and the whole of the rock answered us, and we stood there in the cold making noise like a pair of children for I cannot say how long.
I have not made such a sound since I was small. Not once. I have not produced a single uncalculated noise in twenty-three years, and I made a dozen of them this afternoon inside a hole in a rock where there was no one at all to hear it.
Afterward we sat in the mouth of the fissure with our backs against the stone and watched the tide begin to turn, and I wish to set this next part down with some care, for I do not expect I shall be permitted to keep it long.
He said that a man might hide an army in there.
I said that a man might hide two people.
I did not intend to say it. It left me on its own account, and I heard it go, and I would have given a year of my life to have it back again.
I have not said such a thing aloud in eight years of not saying it.
Nine days ago I should not have said it either.
That is what the announcement has done to me, and I did not know it until I heard my own voice in a cave.
He did not answer directly. He was looking out at the water, and he went very still, and then he said my name — not the whole of it, in the manner my father uses, but the short way, which he has not called me since we were children and my mother put a stop to it.
He said, “Evie —”
And then he stopped.
He stopped, and looked at his hands, and the moment went by.
I said something concerning the tide. He agreed that the tide was coming.
We rose and shook the sand from our clothes, and he handed me down over the wet portion of the rock and released my hand the instant my feet were under me.
We went back across in his boat and spoke of his sister’s cough and whether the Ashworth boy is truly to go to Seattle.
That is the whole of it. That is everything that occurred.
Evie.
How I’ve missed that name upon his lips.
He has not called me so in eight years. He stopped the day my mother overheard it and remarked upon it. He has called me Miss Merrick before any living soul ever since.
There was no living soul upon that rock. There was nobody in the world, but the two of us and a great deal of water. The rules of polite society did not come along with us, and he stopped notwithstanding.
He stopped because he knows what was settled in my father’s study nine days ago as well as I do.
Every soul on this island knows it. He stopped because a man who says a thing like that to a woman who has just been promised elsewhere has made her responsible for it, and Thomas Haven would never put me at such risk.
I could hate him for that. I have been attempting it, at intervals, since he refused to name what was in both our hearts.
I am to be married in the spring, to a man I have met once, whose face I cannot reliably assemble, and yet I shall think about that cave for the remainder of my life.
That is the whole of my difficulty.