Chapter Three
The room is crowded with the five of them in it. There’s very little space to stand around the bed. The smell of blood mixes with the damp, old smell of the house. “What happened to him?” Her voice isn’t her own. Tremulous, high.
The wounded man himself answers. “I got shot.” Then the man called Oppy bends his thin-as-a-reed body over the bed and places his lantern on the windowsill.
With two hands he presses the bloodied cloth to the man’s stomach.
The wounded man swears loudly, using words she’s never heard before, though it’s clear what they mean, and Oppy grimaces as if he feels the pain himself.
He runs a hand through his thick brown hair and some of the blood from his fingers sticks to it.
“He needs a doctor,” she says less shrilly.
“We’re well aware.” The man who says this is mostly bald like the innkeeper of the Shipwrights Arms, but he’s young to be so, only a few years older than her, she thinks.
The wounded man, too, is fairly young, maybe twenty-nine or thirty, though possibly the pain makes him look older.
The other two she thinks are in their midthirties.
The shorter of these, who’s strong-looking in a wiry sort of way, is holding two pistols, one in each hand.
Her heart still beats in her throat. Sweat runs down her back, underneath the cotton of her chemise.
There are five strange men in her room and she’s in a state of undress.
Her hair is in a long plait down her back.
It’s coming loose. She isn’t wearing her stays.
How’s that for rumors? She feels sick, her legs pudding-like.
A low moan from the wounded man drags her out of her thoughts.
Oppy is still pressing the cloth to the wound, but it isn’t doing much good.
The cloth is too drenched with blood. She thinks of George, of when he was shot on board HMS Neptune, how there wasn’t a bed for him to lie in or a woman to help care for him.
She goes to the stairs, and when the taller of the two older men moves to stop her, she snaps, “I’m going to get water from the well. ”
The man says, “Captain?”
“Let her go, Moyle,” the man on the bed says tiredly.
She walks down the stairs as if in a dream, her hand on the wall for support.
She’s shaking inside, rattling with it. Any moment now she thinks her teeth are going to chatter, but they don’t, and she feels her way along the wall to the back door.
Trembling, she takes her pelisse from where it hangs on a nail in the wall and shrugs it on.
In the garden, too, everything is dreamlike.
There’s no moon and she wishes she’d brought a candle, but after a moment her eyes adjust. The sea appears to emit a faint light as she walks down the path to the paradise garden.
The well is dark and bottomless. She has trouble gripping the pulley crank at first; she’s shaking so.
As she begins to turn it, she thinks she shouldn’t be doing it.
She shouldn’t be fetching water for these men.
She should run. She should make her way to the village and call for help.
They are smugglers, she’s sure of it—smugglers or perhaps pirates.
They wouldn’t come in the dead of night carrying pistols if their business was respectable.
She should try to go to St. Keverne and find the customhouse and…
and watch these men get hanged just like that smuggler, Jed Ferries, this morning?
Condemned without a trial, on her testimony alone, for…
what, exactly? Bringing a wounded man into her house?
She has no proof of their smuggling, and—she almost jerks with the realization—even if she did, she’d be loath to hand them over to a man such as Lieutenant Sowerby.
The thought steadies her. So does that of George, dying on the Neptune.
James, who’d been a member of one of the gun crews, told Isabel afterward that he’d watched as they brought George below.
He told her of George’s last moments, of his bravery.
James said he lay there, waiting for the surgeon to pass judgment, James himself with a leg wound beside him.
When it was George’s turn the surgeon said there was nothing he could do for him and there were others he might save, so George lay there, breath frothing because of the hole in his chest. “He said to tell you he loves you,” James told her.
She’d pictured it: George, choking on blood, saying, tell her I love her. The image never left her.
Tears slip down her face as she turns the crank of the well. She brushes at them angrily. Her grip slackens; the bucket drops, but she grasps the crank hard, and using both hands, hauls the bucket all the way up.
She returns to the bedroom carrying the bucket and her chemise from the travel case, the silk one with the lace she’d bought for George’s homecoming.
The man called Moyle and the balding man are about to leave.
The other two regard her warily as she approaches the wounded captain on the bed, bucket in one hand, the silk chemise bunched in the other.
She considered taking one of her other chemises, not wanting to spoil the silk, but she has only three others, all functional, strong cotton ones, which are more useful for wearing here.
“There you are,” the captain says, as if he’s been waiting for her, or perhaps he guessed she might run and tell somebody. He says, “I apologize for disturbing you. We believed the cottage empty.”
“You shouldn’t talk.” She’s still wearing the pelisse.
Pushing up a sleeve, she dips the garment into the bucket and wipes the sweat from the captain’s brow.
His eyes, dark blue by the light of the lantern, stay on hers as she does it.
After a moment, she hands the cloth to Oppy and says, “That cloth is soaked through. Use this instead.”
He lifts it up, fingering the material as if he’s a buyer in a shop. “This fine stuff?”
“It’ll do the job the same as cotton.”
She takes the sullied cloth from him and places it on the floor by her feet. There’s the sound of footsteps on the stairs, going down, then the scrape of the front door as Moyle and the bald man leave.
Oppy says, “I’m going to fetch the doctor, Captain.
Dick will stay here. I’ll be back as quick as I can.
” When he lifts the silk, a fresh trickle of blood flows from the wound.
Isabel takes it from him and presses it to the captain’s stomach again.
The skin around the wound is colored by the sun, too, and there are ripples where the muscles have arranged themselves in a pattern of squares.
A thin line of black hair runs down the center to the right of the wound.
She feels strangely moved by it, by the vulnerability of him.
George was fair-haired and had some hair on his chest, but not down here, down his stomach.
The blood is still flowing. She presses down harder and the captain swears before saying to Oppy, “Take Dick with you, in case you run into trouble.”
Oppy looks doubtful, but the captain glances up at her, and there’s that smile again, very faint, despite everything, despite her hurting him with the cloth and the fact that he’s bleeding all over her mattress and he may be dying, just like George. He says, “I believe I’m in good hands.”
“Are you sure, Captain?” says the wiry man called Dick.
“Go. The sooner Rowell gets here, the better. Be sure to steer clear of the path.”
“Aye.” Dick takes one of the two pistols he’s been holding and puts it on the bed by the captain’s right hand, which lies limply on the blanket.
“You won’t need that,” she says shakily.
“It’s not for you.”
When the door shuts behind the two men, the captain closes his eyes again.
He keeps them closed for so long she worries he has fallen asleep or perhaps he’s dying.
He has lost an awful lot of blood, but he doesn’t talk like a dying man.
He has too many things to say, still, to be dying.
That doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen. She hopes the two men, Dick and the other one, will be back soon with the doctor.
She doesn’t know what she’ll do if the stranger in her bed dies.
The thought is too dreadful to contemplate.
Just as she thinks he isn’t going to wake up until the men get back, the captain opens his eyes and says, “You’re the Bucca’s child. They said you were coming.”
She looks around for another clean cloth, and when she doesn’t see one, dips her hand into the pink water in the bucket and rubs some onto his brow.
His skin is cool under her touch and she thinks maybe she’s doing the wrong thing, maybe she should be making sure he’s warm.
She hasn’t felt the cold herself since she woke up.
Meeting his eyes, she says, “I’m not a child. ”
His gaze moves up from her knees, leisurely and squinting a little, as if she’s made of glass and she’s catching the sun. When it reaches her face, he says, “I can see that.”
She grows hot under his look. She’s conscious of the way the pelisse falls open at the front and the chemise under it clings to her, outlining the shape of her hips and legs.
A rivulet of sweat runs down her back. She wishes she was wearing her stays, at least. Maybe she should do up the buttons of the coat.
But she’ll get blood on the pelisse and it’s her only one, her favorite of the four she used to have—thick, luscious green velvet—and with the way things are, she’ll never have another.
She leaves the coat unbuttoned. The captain is still looking at her.
To hide her confusion, she says, “Are you cold? Shall I make a fire?”
“There’s no need. I’m perfectly warm. But thank you.”