Chapter Twenty
She doesn’t know how it happens, whether she jumps or runs or shoves people out of the way or all of these things at once. She only knows she’s suddenly at the gunwale herself and then she’s going over it, face forward, arms out.
The plunge blinds her. The world is made white, foam, and bubbles. Her hands sting where she cut her palms. When the water clears, so does her head. She turns toward the bottom and kicks her legs. Below her is a shape, blurred by the sea and partly shielded from view by the hull of the ship.
She’s flying again—only now it’s underwater flying.
She swims as if her legs have grown fins, as if her throat has gills and she breathes water like air.
The river here isn’t very deep; the draft of the ship is only some thirteen feet and the bottom is not far below it.
She reaches it in less than a minute, but the lowering of the anchor has stirred up the riverbed and there’s a cloud of sand in the water.
She can no longer see him in the murk. Has he gone under the ship?
A flare of panic threatens to numb her, but she kicks harder, shoving it away.
Gills and fins, deep, slow water-breathing.
She gropes blindly under the hull, feeling her way along the riverbed.
Rocks, seaweed, plants, a creature, large and slithery.
Her fingers brush something soft. Cloth, she thinks, and the water is clearing now, the sand settling on the bottom.
Jack’s eyes are closed, his face relaxed as if in sleep. His hair forms a halo around his head.
She moves behind him, wrapping her arms around his chest. He’s heavy, even underwater.
Tugging at him, pushing with her knees on the gravelly bed of the sea-river, she manages to haul him into a sitting position.
He’s so heavy. How is she ever going to carry him back to the surface?
Panic creeps up on her again, but the river wafts around her like a cloud, like air, and then she’s off, feet kicking hard against the bottom.
Or maybe they’re not feet, maybe her tail swishes against the riverbed and it’s a different kind of kicking—a pushing of fins.
The voice of the sea calls in the swirl of the current: Come home. Swim.
She swims, holding Jack. He’s dead weight in her arms. The water helps hold him up, like a thousand icy hands.
Breaking the surface, she rolls him onto his back.
She’s gasping, believing, for the most fleeting of seconds, she needs water, not air, to breathe.
Then air fills her lungs and she looks at Jack as she swims.
She cannot be sure he’s still alive. He must be alive.
She cannot contemplate the other. The ship is just above her.
Faces look down from the side. She can’t see them clearly; she only sees Jack, the blood running from the side of his head where he hit the wood of the gunwale, into his hair and down the side of his face.
It’s running awfully fast—because of the water, she tells herself.
She thinks he’s still breathing, but she cannot be sure.
Her vision clears a little. One of the men on the ship is aiming a pistol at them, but he doesn’t shoot.
It’d be difficult to aim well from up there, with her in the water.
It’s quite a distance. She remembers George telling her how difficult it is to aim correctly unless you’re right up close to the target.
It’s why the midshipmen still carry dirks, he said.
It’d be easier to aim with a musket, she thinks.
The marines use muskets in battle, but they wouldn’t be carrying them while the ship is anchored.
The French use muskets, too—George was killed by one.
Maybe she’s French. Maybe she was on that ship, the one that was wrecked.
It doesn’t matter now. All that matters is that she gets Jack to safety.
On the frigate, they’re lowering one of the boats.
Looking over her shoulder, she sees the shore is coming closer.
A man stands on the strip of beach in the cove waving his arms. It’s Dick Pascoe.
He’s getting back into the water, wading toward her.
She swims faster. With about a third of the distance left, Jack suddenly coughs and, spluttering, opens his eyes.
“Isabel.” His voice is hoarse. How she loves hearing it—the wonder in it, the strength. She wants to weep, but she can’t. She needs to keep swimming.
He turns in her arms, and for maybe ten seconds they float together, treading water. Then there’s a splash and Jack says, “They’re coming.” Looking past him, she sees the boat in the water and the men pulling the oars.
He wipes the blood from the side of his head and they swim, keeping pace together.
Dick returns to the beach. When they reach the point they can stand, they wade to the shore.
Dick grabs hold of Isabel’s arm, and it’s only then that she realizes she’s stumbling with weariness.
In her mind is still the voice she heard in the water.
Swim. Come home. The water calls to her, blue-soft and cool. The sun dazzles. Come home…
Dick snaps her out of it. “Where’s Will?” he says.
“I last saw him on deck.” She wipes water, strands of hair, the tug of the sea from her eyes.
“I’ve got her,” Jack says, wrapping his arms around Isabel. It’s not cold, but she shivers.
Dick says in a rush, “All the others got off, apart from Kimbrel. Couldn’t swim, the poor bugger. And Will.”
“Damn,” says Jack, shielding his eyes as he looks at the frigate. “They’ll have gotten him now if he didn’t get off. Thank God they’re not aware he’s a smuggler.”
“He tried to escape,” she says. “He was hurt.”
“They’ve got a surgeon on board. Hopefully they won’t punish him for trying to escape—it’s what every impressed hand would do and they sorely need men.
There’s nothing we can do now, in any case; he’ll be back in the brig until the ship sails.
Come. That boat will be here any minute.
” As they hurry up the beach, he looks back at her and calls, “Are you all in one piece?”
She calls back that she is, closing her hands into fists, trying not to wince. It’s difficult to climb back up to the path with the cuts in her hands and in her bare feet. Jack asks if she’ll manage without shoes and she nods.
“Where to, Captain?” Dick asks when they reach the top of the cliff.
Before Jack has the chance to answer, she says, “Harry Tremayne has the Rapide ready to sail from Nelly’s Cove.”
Dick stares at her as if she has just told him Harry Tremayne is ready to take them to the moon.
“Do you mean it?” Jack says.
“Harry said he’d have her ready tonight. There’s a horse waiting for us at the Shipwrights Arms. Only one, though.” She looks back at the Hornet. The boat that’s after them is halfway between the ship and the cove.
Jack folds his arms around her, kissing her wet hair.
“You’re a marvel.” Another kiss, then, “I think we should forego the horse. It won’t be able to carry three and we’d be forced to take the road.
Let’s go through the wood instead.” He’s speaking quickly.
The boat is pulling closer. “What do you think, Isabel?”
The wood receives them as the water did before, sucking them into a sea of green.
They crash through the undergrowth. Isabel keeps her hands close to her sides, the cuts in her palms burning, her breath heaving.
She wishes she had time to loosen her stays.
Twice she stumbles as a pebble presses into the sole of her foot.
Jack keeps looking back at her, as if he cannot believe she’s there.
Her hands ache and her muscles scream and her mind keeps turning back to the guard, crumpled in the hold and the knife gleaming red in her hands, and the image is making her cold despite the warmth of the summer evening and yet—and yet.
She doesn’t remember having been happier.
In spite of it all. Even the first night with George, after their long, blustery wedding day in October, she didn’t feel this.
Even the day he came back from a year at sea.
Not even the last night she spent with Jack in the hammock aboard the Rapide did she feel anything approximating the desperate joy coursing through her.
The spaces between the trees grow blue, then gray, then dark as they go, their trunks black silhouettes against the incoming night. They never see their pursuers. Once, they hear voices behind them, but they’re distant, like an echo of words spoken long ago.
After two exhausting hours they burst from the wood.
Bone weary, they cross the field to Nelly’s Cove more slowly, the half-moon lighting their way.
As they close in on the edge of the cliff, she sees the ship: a shadow against the sea, sails like old blood furled on the masts; the wooden hull dulled to a deep ash gray.
The moment the three of them appear at the top of the cliff, a rowboat launches from the Rapide.
Thirty minutes later, they clamber onto the deck and there’s Harry, embracing each of them in turn, saying, “Captain, we thought you lost,” and, “Mrs. Henley, it’s an honor to sail with you again. ”
“Isabel,” she says, smiling. “It’s Isabel, Harry.”
Jack says, “Will didn’t get off the ship. Do we have enough crew to sail?”
“There’s eight of us, including the three of you, Captain.”
“Good.” Raising his voice, Jack calls, “Stations for making sail! Lay aloft sail loosers!” followed by, “Lay out and let loose!”
“Raise the anchor!” Harry calls in the wake of Jack’s commands.
Jack says, “Is every man aware we sail without papers? They’re willing, regardless?”
Harry grins. “They would be for you, Captain, but there’s no need.”
“My papers were revoked. I have none, now.”
Harry exchanges a glance with Isabel. “I beg to differ, Captain. There’s a neat little set of them waiting on your desk.”