Chapter Seventeen #2
Harriet smiles. “How I hated the thought of marrying him, though. Poor Sir Hugh, I hope he never realized. He was so much older than me and so terribly forbidding and stern. He still is, of course; you’ve seen him.
” She lowers the knife and says, “So you see, Isabel, I do know a bit about loneliness. I experience it every day in my marriage.”
“I’m sorry,” Isabel says, in spite of herself.
Harriet resumes her cutting. “Yes, well, so am I. I’m sorry I didn’t let you explain after I got that letter.
Sir Hugh was terribly angry that I should’ve befriended someone with such a—I’m sorry to say it now, but such a tarnished reputation.
He feared it may reflect on my own. I…I thought I agreed with him, but I have missed seeing you these past weeks, and I see now I have done you an injustice by not giving you the chance to tell your side of the story. ”
“I spoke very harshly to you just now,” Isabel says. “I apologize, Harriet.”
Harriet says, “I deserved it. I knocked again just now to tell you that. However, I didn’t expect to find you trying to cut your hair! You’re lucky I came in. You may have cut yourself if you tried to do the back on your own.”
“Aren’t you going to ask me why I’m cutting it?”
Working on some strands at the back, Harriet says, “I’m sure you have your reasons. I confess you’ve piqued my curiosity, but I feel rather as if I have forfeited the right to ask. There is one thing I should like to ask you, however, though I don’t know if you’ll care to answer.”
“Ask,” she says, shifting her weight from one leg to the other. With her hand, she leans on the kitchen table, brushing the wool of Mrs. Dowling’s shawl.
“Do you love him?” Harriet says.
It’s strange how just a few words can make the flood surge inside her. She struggles to keep still, to not start weeping again. “Yes,” she says. “Yes, I do.”
“As you loved your husband?”
“More.” She waits for the slap of guilt, but it doesn’t come.
She and George were children, she thinks, or very nearly so.
They had so little time in which to know each other.
It’s different with Jack. The way they talk together, it’s as if they’ve managed to fit several years of understanding in the span of weeks.
“And does Mr. Carlyon love you?”
“Yes.” So simple—and she’s so certain, though he has never said it.
Harriet sighs behind her. “I envy you, Isabel.”
“You envy me? You must be mad.”
“I don’t envy the situation in which you find yourself, naturally.
I can only imagine the despair you must feel on account of Mr. Carlyon’s impending fate.
Only…I always dreamed of that. Of true love.
” Another giggle, this one short and a little flat.
“I’m such a dolt, aren’t I? I believed in fairy tales, too, for the longest time.
Sometimes I think I haven’t done enough growing up yet.
That’s what Sir Hugh says, that I’m in many ways like a child, still.
But you see, I don’t have that with Sir Hugh.
Love. There is a certain level of affection, but nothing like what you have with Mr. Carlyon.
I wish…I wish there was something I could do to help. ”
Isabel sucks in her breath sharply. “You would help me?”
“If I could.”
“Could…” She barely dares to ask. “Could Sir Hugh not pardon Jack?”
“Oh, Isabel. Sir Hugh doesn’t have that sort of power. And I’m afraid he wouldn’t want to if he did.”
Her mind races through the different steps—the ship, the horse, Jack’s clothes, the story she’ll tell them on board the Hornet, about how she wants to volunteer…“There is something,” she says. It takes her the remainder of the haircut to explain.
“You’d like me to forge a special license?” Harriet says, placing the knife on the kitchen table with a clang. “You want me to break the law to help a smuggler? You don’t deny he is a smuggler, do you?”
“I don’t,” she says. “But hanging him without a trial for a murder committed in self-defense also constitutes a breach of the law. It’s up to you to judge which crime you consider the more egregious.”
Harriet is silent for a moment. Her cheeks are rosier than usual against the pale canvas of her face; her mouth, rose red, moves as if in prayer.
Eventually, she says, “I’ll do it, on one condition.
You write to me, once you have gotten away.
Tell me about all your adventures. I shall be living them through your letters, dear Isabel. ”
“I’ll write. I promise,” she says.
“These documents, they have to be in Mr. Carlyon’s name?”
“And bear your husband’s seal.”
“Very well. Could I bring them to you tomorrow?”
“Could you take them to Mr. Harry Tremayne at Roskorwell, please, as soon as you possibly can? He lives in the white thatched cottage at the end of the estate. I won’t be here.” She takes up the pile of Jack’s clothes and unfolds the pair of breeches.
Harriet is looking at her strangely. “You plan to wear these garments?”
“Yes,” she says. “They belong to Jack.”
Harriet starts. “Do you mean to say you and him—actually, don’t tell me.” A small smile, then, “You may have wondered why Sir Hugh and I are childless. He’s too old for that sort of thing, he says.”
“I’m sorry, Harriet.”
“It’s just as well, I suppose.”
With her left hand, Isabel touches the ends of her hair. They only reach to her chin. She has never worn her hair this short before, not since she was a child. “Thank you for cutting my hair. I would’ve cut off my ear, probably.”
Voice low, Harriet says, “Isabel, what is it you mean to do?”
She gazes at Harriet, wondering if she can be trusted or if she’ll run straight to her husband and tell. But she needs Harriet’s help—she has already involved her by asking her to get the ship’s documents. “I mean to volunteer to join His Majesty’s Navy,” she says, deciding.
Harriet shrieks. “You never! Isabel, do you have any idea what you’re doing?”
She explains. By the time she has finished, Harriet’s cheeks are like polished red apples, her eyes bright as if she’s in a fever. “Oh, the daring of it!” she says, clapping her hands as if she’s just watched the conclusion to an exciting play.
Isabel says, “I’m going to see in the looking glass if I may pass for a boy.”
“Put the breeches on first,” Harriet says. “And you shall need a weapon.”
Glancing up sharply, she says, “A weapon?”
“You don’t mean to go without, do you? You’ll need to be able to defend yourself. I appreciate you can’t take a pistol or a sword, but you ought to take this at least.” She lifts the meat knife from the table and holds it out to Isabel.
She takes it, turning it over in her hand, inspecting the blade. “I suppose you’re right. I hadn’t thought of it.” She checks Jack’s breeches: thank heavens there are pockets. Deep ones, too.
Harriet says, “What would you do if it weren’t for me?
Your hair would look an absolute fright.
It looks dreadful as it is. But what’s this?
” Knitted lace spills from her hand as she lifts Mrs. Dowling’s shawl from the table.
“Oh, Isabel, this is exquisite! Wherever did you get it? From London?” She caresses the wool as if it’s Buttons’s gleaming neck.
“It was my landlady’s wedding shawl,” Isabel says.
“She thought perhaps I might be able to make use of it.” It’s the first time she blushes in Harriet’s presence.
The first time, too, that she grasps the extent of Harriet’s confinement in what she calls her walled garden.
Suddenly, she understands what her friend meant when she said she envied her.
“It’s simply wonderful. Did she make this?”
“Her mother did. I won’t be able to take it, however.” She takes the shawl back from Harriet, refolds it, and places it on the table with reverence.
Harriet tries to help her with the ties on the back of her dress, but not having the experience, she’s slower than when Isabel does it herself.
The dress falls to the floor in a waterfall of cotton.
Up in the bedroom, Harriet angles the looking glass in such a way Isabel is able to see most of herself in small, broken images: a length of buckskin-clad thigh here, a swish of chin-length hair there, the blue knit cap completing the picture.
Everything but the cap is too big: she has rolled up the shirtsleeves and has tied the breeches at the top with the neckerchief.
It’s strange wearing Jack’s clothes again.
She spent the happiest time of her life wearing his shirt and breeches aboard the Rapide, and also the most desperate after Jack shot Lieutenant Sowerby.
“You’ll pass,” Harriet says, surveying her. “You might want to slump a little, with your shoulders like this.” She demonstrates the stance. “Just to ensure no one sees the shape of you underneath that shirt. It will make you look younger, too, if you appear uncertain.”
“You have deception down to an art, Harriet,” she says.
Harriet giggles. “I’ve had much practice, living with Sir Hugh. Now, when have you last eaten?”
“I couldn’t eat. Not now.”
“As I thought. You must eat, Isabel, or you’ll be too hungry to rescue Mr. Carlyon.” Harriet’s hands fly to her cheeks, cradling her face. “I can’t believe I’ve just said that! I can’t believe we’re doing this.”
She likes how Harriet says, we’re doing this, as if she, Isabel, doesn’t have to do it alone.
“I shall make you a pot of tea,” Harriet says decisively. “It can’t be difficult, surely.”
“The fire isn’t lit. It’ll take far too long.”
“Why ever have they not kept the fire lit?” Then, realizing: “Oh! Of course. A biscuit then or perhaps some bread?”
“I have an end of a loaf left. Thank you, Harriet.” She glances at the clock in its walnut case. It’s a few minutes before three.
Harriet lifts her skirts. From atop the stairs, she glances back at the bedroom door. “What an odd little bedroom you have.”
—
The coastal path is damp; it has rained short but hard while she was inside. The green tunnel drips rain and bright flecks of sunlight. The air is sticky, but she’s remarkably cool in the thin leather breeches.
There was something forlorn about Harriet when she left. Isabel didn’t wait for her friend to ride off on Buttons before she set out. Now that she has dressed the part, she’s eager to go play it, a mix of hope and dread whirling inside her.
When she’s nearly at the cove, a terrible thought stops her abruptly.
What if the Hornet has moved? She breaks into a run, her breath shallow in the prison of her stays, which she has fastened as tight as she could to flatten her bosom.
Two more turns of the path, one, and there she yet lies, thank heavens, guarding the mouth of the river, her sails furled, some of her rigging unexpectedly slack.
Catching her breath, she removes her shoes and leaves them on the beach before she gets into the water.
The flat of the blade in her pocket pushes against her hip as she swims, Jack’s shirt billowing around her like a cloud.
The sea is cold, but not as cold as it was when she swam in Frenchman’s Creek with Jack.
The dance of nerves slows; the sea calms her as it always does.
She’s far from shore now, the water under her black as night.
On board the ship, voices ring out, and when she looks up, she sees a small crowd assembling along the gunwale.
Shouts and pointed fingers: it’s as if they’re pointing right through her disguise.
She closes her eyes briefly, steadying her resolve as she continues to swim toward the ship.
She’s a boy, fifteen years of age, hungry like a starved dog, she reminds herself. She isn’t Isabel Henley anymore.
Maybe she never was, she thinks. The way she feels she could keep swimming forever without tiring; the way she revels in the cool embrace of the sea, coming home in its vast arms—maybe she’s someone she never believed she was. A child of the sea.
As she approaches the ship, the words come to her again: Come home. Swim. Spoken in the voice of the river, of the current, of the wind and the gulls.
She cannot listen to it now. She must concentrate on the frigate.
Looking up again, she can see the faces of the men assembled on deck.
They’re faces smooth with youth and faces heavily lined with age, light and dark faces and one with an eye patch, and they’re all turned to her as she closes the last twenty feet between herself and the ship.
Up close, the frigate is far bigger than she thought.
The hull towers over her, twice the height of the old pilchard shed, all gleaming wood broken up by gunports.
Along the waterline, a feast of seaweed and barnacles sticks to the ship.
She’s close to the open sea now and what she assumed was a gentle bobbing up and down turns out to be a serious roll.
She aims for the wooden steps set into the hull near the bow, but her first attempt to grab the lowest rung sees her dip under the surface. She swallows her breath just in time, and when she comes back up, one of the men on deck throws a rope over the side. “Take it!” he shouts.
The rope twists like an angry snake. She stretches out her hand, treading water, but it slips away. Just as she thinks she’ll go under again her fingers close around the rough hemp. She hoists herself up, feet slipping on the rungs of the ladder.
A cheer goes up along the gunwale and she feels it in her chest, an expanding warmth, as if it’s the crew of the Rapide cheering her on.
Again the ship rolls, but this time she’s expecting it and she holds still, waiting for the Hornet to right herself again.
The rope burns her hands as she pulls herself up, feeling the strain in every one of her muscles.
When she reaches the deck, large, calloused hands grab hold of her arms. One set belongs to the eye-patch-wearer who’s saying, “There you are, boy, there you are,” with a mouth full of gums. They pull her up over the gunwale and set her on her feet.
The ship rolls and she moves with it, shifting her weight as she finds her balance.
The men are craning their necks to take a look at her as she stands, dripping, on the deck.
The wind whips at her shirt and she grasps the hem with both hands to keep it in place.
When she lifts her head, she’s looking at the point of a knife.