Chapter Five
During the days that follow she keeps up a flurry of activity.
She washes clothes, sheets, and blankets until her hands are raw and hangs everything out to dry.
She washes Jack’s shirt, too, but the blood doesn’t come out.
The cotton is very fine. No wonder, she thinks, with the kind of profits he’s making.
Mrs. Dowling tells her for stains on white you want to put the garment out to dry flat on the grass in the bright sun.
“That’ll bleach it good and proper,” she says.
Isabel doesn’t tell her what kind of stains they are.
She starts to mend the tear in the shirt.
This is something she can do, at least, and do well.
It’s a long rip, right across the bottom half, with a small part missing where the bullet took part of the cloth.
She used to mend things for George sometimes.
He could do it himself—they were taught how as midshipmen and of course any of the servants could do it—but she liked to do it for him.
Every afternoon, she sits on the white bench in the garden and sews.
The river fans out before her like a length of blue silk satin under a partly cloudy sky.
She watches the gulls dip and rise as she stitches.
They make her think of the creatures George saw on his journeys: all manner of sharks and dolphins, strange fish with spiky bodies and giant white birds in South America, and once, a whale nearly the length of the ship.
Nobody believed that one, but he swore it was true.
She thinks of the villagers’ belief in the sea spirit shaped like a merman.
Could it be that there are things in the ocean of which they have no knowledge?
Almost as if in response, the sun appears, lifting the blue into bright iridescence as it hits the water, and the longing to get in and follow the current briefly takes her breath away.
The nights are quiet, apart from one. It’s the evening before the next market day, late enough only the moon differentiates between the black of the river and that of the sky.
Isabel’s working her way through a leather-bound volume titled The Experienced English Housekeeper, which Mrs. Dowling has lent her.
She has just started on chapter fourteen, “Possets, Gruel the possibility of revenue men passing by on the path can no longer stop her.
The outgoing tide has pushed the beach into wet ripples, as if the sand, too, is a live thing, full of motion like the sea.
Indecision grips her another moment, then she kicks it to the side and strips down to her chemise as fast as she can.
The breeze pulls at the fabric, caressing her skin, and she looks at it, at the crisp white cotton that took so long to wash and dry, and then she takes this off, too, as well as her stays.
The river bites her flesh when she enters the water, it’s that cold—like dropping through ice.
She kicks her legs hard and moves her arms, puffing with the effort, and then she’s through the worst of it.
The cold recedes and she pushes off properly, away from the rocks, and swims. She’s quite warm now.
The water glints around her. With the sun on it like this it’s no longer black, but a hundred shades of green and blue, like the turquoise stone George brought her back from Naples.
She glides through the water, reveling in the way her arms and legs are free from the constraint of her clothes and the weight of gravity.
She has always been a good swimmer, though she doesn’t remember the first time she swam.
Her parents swore they didn’t teach her; it’s simply something she has always been able to do.
She swims for maybe half an hour. She could go longer, but she has supper to prepare.
She wishes she could swim the whole day and all through the night, going and going, right out to sea and then across the ocean.
She wonders what the ocean feels like at night, when it’s so dark you cannot imagine there being an end to it.
Perhaps it’s like that if you go deep enough under the surface; perhaps it’s always night.
The swimming is more than just refreshing.
For the first time since she came to Helford she doesn’t feel alone.
No, that’s not right—for the first time since the smuggler left the cottage.
Every time she walks by the shed, she wonders if she should go to the innkeeper, Tom Holder, and tell him she has news for his friend from the cove.