by Jill Barnett
On the other side of the rocks the water was cooler and looked dense and black. She swam downward in a spiral circle. Searching. Out of the corner of her eye, a flash of white flicked just below her.
She flipped and kicked down toward it, grabbing blindly. Her hands found nothing. She reached out again and again, frantically.
Her hand brushed against fabric. Her fist closed over it. The child’s nightgown.
Georgina kicked upward, pulling the girl with her. She could see the surface hovering above them. A small area shone silver-gold in the weak glow of the distant lantern light and waved eerily above the rock ledge, just a few feet away, maybe only one, two, three more strong kicks upward.
Her chest was aching with tight air; it felt as if it would burst. She kicked up again and again, one . . . two . . . three . . . and more times. The pain in her chest scared her, it swelled so severely. Time had seemed to stop.
She tore at her full petticoat until she had ripped it off and it drifted down and away. She held the child with one arm and reached toward the surface. She kicked again, hard and powerfully.
She broke through the surface and gasped. Cold damp air cooled her mouth, throat, and chest. Water slapped at her face. She jerked the child up, slid her hands under girl’s limp arms, and pulled her head out of the water.
Georgina waited to hear the child gasp.
There was nothing. The little girl’s eyes were closed. Her lips were closed. She was grayish and didn’t move.
“Breathe! Come on . . . ” Georgina nudged her small chin up. “Breathe!” she shouted into the child’s ear. “I said breathe!”
The girl choked and began to struggle, kicking and slapping at the water and Georgina while she coughed up water and air.
“Stop it!” Georgina held her tighter. “Hold still or you’ll drown us both!”
The girl gasped twice, then began to struggle and kick, shaking her head from side to side and saying, “Let me go! Let me go!” She kicked Georgina in the stomach and tried to move away.
Georgina hissed. “Stop it!”
Finally the girl stilled, staring up at her with frightened eyes.
“I’m not going to hurt you. But if you don’t hold still, you’ll drown both of us.”
The child stared at her for a long tense moment.
“Do you understand?”
The girl nodded.
Georgina glanced around to get her bearings. The fog hovered right above them. She could see the rocks to her left, but they were more distant. The water was moving faster. It felt colder on her legs and the current was stronger.
She could hear the sea rushing against the island’s rocks. The sound grew louder. Closer. The current was carrying them away from rocks and the cave.
Georgina clamped her arm over the child’s bony chest so she was pinned against her body. Then she began to swim, taking one-armed strokes that were deep but difficult. It was like swimming through mud.
When the stitch in her side became so sharp that breathing was hard, she paused and treaded water to rest. She stared blankly at the water and the white fog surrounding them.
This seemed so futile. And she was tired. The child coughed and Georgina looked down at her. She knew she needed to keep the girl’s head above water.
And my own.
She almost laughed out loud. Keeping her head above water . . .
“Seems that’s all I’ve done lately,” she muttered.
She felt the girl’s stare and looked down at her. This was Georgina’s own little snippet of irony. No one else but her bankers would understand.
So she began to swim again in the same hard-fought, side-arm strokes. Her breath grew short and sharp. It felt as if the tide and current were giant hands trying to hold her back and keep her from reaching the shore.
To get her bearings she glanced left, right, then back over her shoulder. A faint glow of yellow light spilled through the mouth of the cave, making it look for one crazy moment like a cynical smile. She stared at it, knowing that smile would slowly and eerily disappear as the tide filled the cave.
The fog rolled up and down with the sea like shades on a window. One moment she could catch a snatch of black rocky coastline. The next moment there was nothing but a cocoon of mist.
She didn’t swim on. She knew to wait until the fog lifted high enough for her to see the cave. Then she could gain some perspective. And when that mist finally did lift a bit, the light from the cave had grown smaller; the smile was narrow now and upside down like a frown.
Amy had to be inside the cave. The lantern was still there. But the tide was rising and it would trap her. She took a deep breath and shouted, “Amy!”
There was no answer.
“Amy!”
Still nothing.
“Amy!”
The air sounded as if it carried a distant voice. Or she thought it did.
“Amy!” she screamed as loudly as she could.
The sound came again. But it wasn’t Amy.
It was a man’s voice.
“Father!” the child screamed and began to struggle in her arms again.
Georgina fought to hold the girl, but she heard a deep and familiar voice. “Kirsty?”
Oh God . . . no, she thought. Not him.
“Kirsty!” he shouted.
“Here, Father! We’re here!”
She heard him swear, the same word he’d used when she kicked him. Georgina looked down. This little girl was the oaf’s daughter?
There was the sound of a splash, and instinctively she turned toward it. A foolish mistake.
Turn away from him, not toward him!
But before she could move or even breathe, a man’s muscled arm closed around her and the girl, almost lifting them from the water with one swift motion. Without a word, he swam back through the currents, carrying them along with an almost supernatural power.
They hit the shore so quickly Georgina was stunned. She couldn’t decide if they were really that close to shore or if he actually swam that well. She struggled to stand but couldn’t because he held her too tightly; his arm was clamped around her waist.
He never said a word, but every time she tried to move he tightened his grip on her and pinned both her and the child closer to his chest. He moved sluggishly up a steep dune, then dropped them in the damp sand, falling to his knees next to her.
She held the little girl, who was strangely silent and still as she lay sprawled on Georgina’s body.
For a few moments no one spoke. The only sound was the rush of their breathing. His. Hers. The child’s.
Georgina started to move, but he planted a hand in the sand above her shoulder and straddled her hips with his hard knees. He moved too quickly for a man who had swum so hard. Her arms and legs felt as limp as the soaked ribbons on her gown.
She met his hard look. “Amy’s still inside a cave.” Odd how her voice was smaller and breathy. Weak. It didn’t sound like her.
He didn’t respond.
She cleared her throat. “The tide’s coming in.”
“Calum!” was all he said.
Someone loomed over them.
The oaf looked up. “The other one’s stuck in a sea cave.”
“Which cave? Where?” It was the brother’s panicked voice.
She pointed where the fog floated slightly, showing the thin slice of light that was left. Her hand was shaking.
“The caves to the south,” Eachann answered him. “It must be the one near the point. Hurry, Calum. The tide’s rising.”
A second later Calum MacLachlan was gone and all she heard was the sound of someone running down the beach.
She was racked with a sudden chill, as if someone had just thrown water on her. She was soaked and half spent, a small child lying so still on her and Eachann MacLachlan kneeling over them. He was braced on his forearms. Cold water dripped from his hair onto her neck and shoulders.
Plop. Plop. Drips that were like numbers counting down toward something
ominous—perhaps the moment the world would come crashing down on her.
Georgina raised her chin to meet the look she expected to see. It took every ounce of strength she had left to hold her chin up and not shake. Her body seemed on the verge of shattering. She could feel the shakes coming as she looked at him.
But he wasn’t looking at her. His gaze was fixed on his daughter, his expression so hard it looked ready to crack.
“What in the hell have you been doing?”
The girl was still as a stone.
“Kirsty?”
“Me?” the child asked in a hoarse tone.
“Aye.”
She looked away and mumbled something about plaids and thieves and guns and saving relics like medieval knights had.
It was utter nonsense.
But the oaf was distracted. Her perfect chance.
Cautiously, Georgina started to slide back and out from under both of them. But her feet felt oddly numb. She tried again.
His hand shot out and clamped onto her arm.
She stared down at his hand. It was so large he almost held her entire upper arm in that one tight grip. Her breath was a lump in her throat when she glanced back at him.
“Don’t move.” He pinned his daughter with another cold look. “I want the truth, not one of your stories, Kirsty.”
The girl’s teeth began to chatter and she was shaking the way Georgina wanted to.
All of them were soaked and surrounded by cold damp fog and even colder wet sand.
The oaf seemed oblivious to it.
Georgina’s mind flashed back in time to the chilling image of another little girl sitting on a sand dune shaking from fear and exertion.
No one had noticed her either.
Something snapped inside of her and she pulled the little girl so close against her that the child’s wet head slipped snugly beneath Georgina’s chin. “For God’s sake, lecture her later!”
He gave her a sharp look.
“Get the poor child inside before she freezes to death.”
The child tilted her head for a moment and stared up at her, still shaking stiffly with those cold and shimmying kinds of shakes that your body won’t let you control. Georgina knew then because she was shaking with them too.
But she was silent. She met Eachann’s hard look with one of her own.
His hand fell away. His gaze flicked from her to his daughter. He muttered another curse, then grabbed something that was lying in the sand and wrapped it around them.
It was his coat. Before she could blink he was standing above them. A second later he scooped them up in his arms and carried them off through the mist.
Chapter 19
Be respectful of your superiors, if you have any.
—Advice to Youth, Mark Twain
Kirsty scowled at the black-haired woman huddled in a scratchy blanket like hers and sitting near her on the wool rug. The two of them were locked in the bathing room with a toasty fire burning in the corner woodstove.
The woman had been staring at her hands, which were knotted into tight fists and pressed against her belly as if she were angry. If Kirsty had liked her, she might have said the woman was very pretty, maybe even beautiful.
The lady looked up as if she somehow knew she was thinking about her.
Kirsty gave her a fierce stare. She decided the lady’s long wet hair was really a bunch of curly black snakes that would bite you if you got too close. Her skin was white. Didn’t ghosts have white skin? They must have white skin because they were really dead and so they had no blood left inside of them.
This woman had snaky hair and dead-ghost skin and . . . and wicked kelpie eyes that were looking at her right now.
Kirsty tried to look at the woman the same way she looked at her classmates when they made her feel she wasn’t good enough to play with them. She sat a little straighter and said, “I don’t like you.”
“Good. I’m not particularly fond of you either.” She slapped her hair out of her face and it whipped back behind her. Her hair was so long the tips of it brushed the rug.
She ignored Kirsty and looked around the bathing room, frowning. She stared at the tank and tub for a long time, then she looked around some more. After a moment she muttered, “No windows.”
Kirsty watched her cautiously. If she was looking for windows that meant she was going to steal something else or she was going to try to get away. “Father locked the door and now you can’t get out.”
“Thank you for that brilliant piece of knowledge. I doubt I could have figured it out on my own, windows being so hard to distinguish.”
“What’s distinguish?”
“Something your father isn’t.”
Kirsty didn’t like it when grownups did that, made funny remarks that they knew she didn’t understand. But she wouldn’t let the lady know it. She pulled her blanket tighter around herself and stared at her because she wanted to make her feel uneasy, too.
The woman gave her the same look, and hers worked better because Kirsty felt as if she could see every next thought inside her head. Kirsty tried to think of everything ugly . . . snakes and spiders and Miss Harrington’s ruler.
But the lady wasn’t paying attention to her anymore. Instead she talked to herself and muttered something about kidnapping.
Kirsty stuck her chin up in the air. “My father would never let you kidnap Graham and me.”
“Kidnap you?” She burst out laughing. “Now that’s rich.”
“My father is the bravest and strongest man in the whole world.”
The woman stopped laughing. She was quiet for a second. She stared at Kirsty as if she wanted to say something very badly. But she didn’t speak, just looked like she was concentrating really hard, the way Kirsty had to do during arithmetic lessons.
The lock clicked suddenly and they both turned toward the door at the same time. Her father filled the doorway like those paintings in Harrington Hall filled their big frames.
“Well, well . . . ” the woman said in a snotty voice. “Look at this. Samson’s here.”
Kirsty looked back at the lady again, wondering if she was making fun of her. But the lady was glaring at her father with one of those prickly looks people got when they wanted to let you know they’d get even. The same nasty look Chester Farriday gave her when he pulled his dumb old head from the mop bucket.
Her father stood there with dry clothes over his arm while he stared at the woman. He didn’t look angry, but she had his full attention, something that Kirsty had to work so hard for.
“She’s a thief,” Kirsty reminded him.
Her father’s gaze flicked to her. “She saved your foolish little life.”
“I can swim.” She could swim.
He looked as if he wanted to argue but said nothing. Instead he tossed her dry nightclothes. She watched him while she quickly changed clothes. He closed the door, walked over, and stood above the snake-haired woman, who had to crane her neck back to look all the way up at her father. He was so very tall.
“I told you to get out of those wet clothes, George.”
The lady pulled the blanket tighter around her and her jaw got really tight. “No.”
They looked at each other for the longest time. Kirsty sat there watching them, looking from one to the other. The air grew really funny, like it did before a lightning storm when it was perfectly quiet and all the birds had suddenly gone away.
She didn’t like the way her father looked at this George woman. She didn’t know why. All she knew was she wanted him to stop because she was getting one of those strong feelings she got inside her sometimes. It was like her heart hurt or some important part of her was growing really small and soon there wouldn’t be anything left. She used to get that feeling just before she began to do something really dumb, like cry.
“So you want to stay in those soaked clothes and freeze to death.” He wore a strange smile, the kind Graham had when he knew a secret and hadn’t told her.
; “I’m perfectly fine.”
He pulled his gaze away from the snake woman and looked at Kirsty. “Go to bed. And stay there.”
Kirsty didn’t move, but watched her father turn away from her again. He leaned down and picked up the woman by her waist so she was standing really close to him. He said something to her in a low voice that no matter how hard she tried Kirsty couldn’t hear.
No one seemed to notice when she stood and moved closer to them. She moved quietly until she was so close to them that the woman’s torn dress dripped cold water onto her bare feet.
Her ghost skin had turned bright pink, and she said, “I wouldn’t try to do that if I were you.”
“Is that a challenge, George?”
Kirsty tugged on her father’s shirtsleeve while she looked up at them. “Do what?”
They both turned toward her.
“I told you to go to bed.”
“I’m not tired.”
Her father let the woman go for a second and ran a hand through his hair. He looked at her and then at the woman. “Get out of those wet clothes and put this on.” He handed the woman some clothes. On top was something green and shiny and familiar.
“No! That was Mama’s!” Kirsty yanked the dress out of the woman’s hands and held it tightly against her so no one could take it away.
Her father looked at her as if she had socked him.
“It was Mama’s,” she said, and to her horror she could feel herself start to cry. The tears just rose up from her chest to stick in her throat like thick choking mud stuck to your feet.
“It’s only a dress,” he said. “What does it matter?”
Kirsty didn’t answer him. She just looked down at the dress, which was dotted with small dark wet spots from her tears.
“Now that was brilliant, MacOaf,” the lady muttered.
“How was I supposed to know she would do this?”
“You wouldn’t know. Obviously that kind of knowledge would involve thinking.”
Her father swore under his breath, then looked at Kirsty, frowning fiercely. “Are you crying?”