Chapter Eighteen
He saw her fall.
Not the descent—he had missed that, his back to the cliff, hauling a length of waterlogged ash toward the pile.
What he saw was the movement on the sand.
A figure running—not walking, not picking her way down the path the way she did everything else on this headland, with deliberation and that maddening, cataloguing care—but running, flat-out, her skirt gathered in one fist and her boots throwing sand behind her, heading for the water.
He dropped the timber.
She was a hundred yards ahead and moving fast, faster than he would have credited—she was slight, and that gown was heavy enough when dry, and she ran in it as though it were nothing, as though the body inside it had dispensed with every encumbrance the mind could not shed.
He shouted her name. The wind carried it sideways.
He shouted again, louder, the sound tearing from his throat with a rawness that had nothing to do with volume.
She did not turn.
He ran. The sand was heavy beneath his boots—the wet, compacted surface that resisted every stride—and she was still ahead, already in the shallows, the water at her ankles, at her calves.
He could see what she was running toward: a dark shape at the surf’s edge, elongated, motionless.
Wreckage. Canvas, from the look of it—a sail bundle, tangled with rope.
The kind of debris the channel deposited after every storm.
She could not see that. She could only see whatever she had come to this coast to find. Whatever she had been writing to harbourmasters about.
He understood it in the same instant he understood that the tide had turned.
The water was coming in. He could read it in the way the surf reached further with each cycle, in the darkening of the sand ahead of her, in the thin sheet of foam that ran laterally along the beach in the direction that meant the flood had begun.
The spit to the south was already submerging.
The rock shelf at the base of the cliff—his path back—had perhaps twenty minutes before it was covered entirely.
She was in the water to her thighs. She had reached the bundle. She crumpled to her knees.
He did not stop running. The water hit him at the shins, and the cold went through his boots and into the bone, and he did not care. She was bent forward, her hands on the canvas, her head nearly at the surface, and he was fifty yards from her and closing when the surge came.
He saw it lift her. Saw the water rise around her without breaking—a smooth, lateral swell that had no crest and no warning—and she went sideways with it, her arms reaching for something that was no longer beneath her, her face turning toward air she could not find.
The water rolled her once. She surfaced—a hand, a gasp, hair plastered across her face—and the second surge took her before the first had finished.
She went under. She did not come back up.
He was in the water to his waist. “Elizabeth!” The current pulled at his legs with a force that bore no resemblance to the gentle swells he had been watching from the beach—the flood tide through the channel accelerated here, where the reef narrowed the passage, and the water that looked knee-deep from shore ran chest-deep ten paces further and waist-deep ten paces beyond that with a lateral drag that could take a man off his feet if he did not know where to stand.
He knew where to stand. He knew the drop-off, the shelf, the channel’s grip, and the angles at which a body could resist it.
She had gone under six feet to his left. He threw himself sideways into the current and reached.
His hand found fabric. The gown—heavy, sodden, dragging her down as thoroughly as if she had been weighted.
He closed his fist in it and pulled. Her body came toward him through the water with a terrible limpness, no resistance, no struggle.
He got his arm beneath her shoulders and hauled her against his chest, and the current took them both sideways.
He set his feet against the sand and drove backward, toward the beach, toward the air, with her body against him and her head lolling and the water fighting him for every inch.
The sand found his heels. He dragged her clear of the surf—clear of the foam, clear of the reach of the next swell—and laid her upon the wet sand and the world contracted to the space between his hands and her face.
She was not breathing.
Her lips were blue. Her skin was the colour of tallow. Water ran from her mouth and from her nose, her chest did not rise, and her eyes were closed.
A howl of rage split the air… his? His hands were at her face, her shoulders, tracing the waxen skin with a horror he had never felt.
The sea had done this! The sea had taken her the way it took everything upon this coast—without malice, without intention, with the indifferent appetite of something so vast that a single woman in its shallows was no more than a leaf carried sideways by a river.
He shook her body, her head bouncing like a rag doll. “Breathe, Elizabeth!”
He turned her onto her side. Water poured from her mouth—a quantity that should not have fit inside her, salt and grit and the grey-brown murk of sand suspended in seawater.
He struck her back with the flat of his hand.
Once. Twice. The force of it rocked her frame against the sand.
Nothing. No cough, her chest did not move.
Her mouth hung open, and the water ran from it, and she lay upon the beach with the stillness of a thing the tide had deposited and the tide would reclaim.
No! The word arrived in his chest before it reached his mouth. He did not say it aloud because saying it would have meant acknowledging that this was a thing that required denial, and denial implied the possibility that it would not be denied, and that possibility he would not—could not—
He rolled her onto her back. He tilted her head, the way he had been taught on a deck in another life when the navy still believed it owned him—chin up, jaw forward, the airway opened against the tongue’s dead weight.
He pinched her nose shut with fingers that shook, and the shaking enraged him because his hands did not shake, his hands were the steadiest things upon this headland, his hands trimmed wicks and struck flint and polished brass to a tolerance that satisfied no one but himself, and they did not shake.
He sealed his mouth over hers and breathed.
The intimacy of it did not register. There was no intimacy.
There was air and the absence of air and the mechanical fact that her lungs would not fill themselves, but his could.
The distance between those two facts could be closed by the same action he had performed on a drowning sailor in the Channel seven years ago, when the man had been pulled from the water with the same blue lips and the same terrible stillness.
Then, he had knelt on a heaving deck and breathed into a stranger’s mouth, and the stranger had lived.
He breathed again. And again. Her chest rose and fell with his breath, not hers—a ghastly puppet motion, the body performing life without inhabiting it.
He pulled back. Watched. She did not breathe on her own.
He struck her back again, harder this time, with a fury that was aimed at her and at the sea and at whatever God or principle governed a world in which this woman had survived a collapsed chimney and a ruined coat and a fortnight of his worst behaviour, only to drown in three feet of water chasing a ghost.
He breathed into her again. Once. Twice. A third time.
She convulsed.
The cough came from somewhere below the lungs—deep, wrenching, a sound that belonged to the body’s machinery rather than to anything she controlled.
Water erupted from her mouth. He turned her sideways and held her shoulders while she coughed and retched and expelled the sea from her chest in long, agonising spasms that shook her entire frame.
Her fingers clawed at the sand. Her back arched.
She gasped—a raw, tearing inhalation that was the most violent and the most beautiful sound he had ever heard—and then she was breathing, ragged and shallow and laced with coughing, but breathing.
He did not let go of her shoulders. His hands stayed where they were.
She coughed again, and again, and the water ran from her mouth into the sand.
Her eyes opened but did not focus, and her breathing steadied by degrees into something that resembled human respiration rather than the desperate mechanics of a body dragging itself back from a place it had nearly chosen to remain.
He held her up when her arms threatened to collapse under her, catching her by the waist and pulling her to him. “You fool,” he said. His voice came from a place he did not recognise—low, wrecked, scraped clean of every modulation he had spent five years perfecting. “You absolute fool.”
She could not answer. She heaved on the sand with his hands around her waist and the surf reaching for her gown and the sky enormous and grey above them both.
And the tide was coming in.
The cut-out was not a cave. It was a cleft in the rock face—narrow, angled upward, deep enough to hold two people above the high-water mark if they pressed themselves into the stone.
A shelf of rock formed a rough floor some eight feet above the beach, accessible by a scramble up broken stone that he could manage alone but that required, with her weight against him, a series of movements so awkward and so intimate that he stopped thinking about them entirely and simply moved.