by Summer Devon
Their boat was next in the queue. Carne and Billy maneuvered as close as they could to the ship, which rose high above them. Barnacles encrusted the wood near the waterline. Carne inhaled the odor of wet wood and seawater as his boat bumped alongside. He threw grappling lines to someone above to keep the craft tethered and stared up at the bottom of a large crate lowering slowly to him.
He and Billy guided the cargo to the deck. The boat settled more deeply in the water at the added weight. He beckoned the crew to send down another. This fairly large skiff could bear more weight than the smaller ones and the sooner they had this ship offloaded, the better, as the storm grew fierce.
A smaller crate came down. Wine or brandy, Carne guessed, with bottles swaddled in cloth and nesting in straw in watertight crates. Their seams were sealed with wax for added protection. He recalled the brandy he and Phillip had drunk. How rich and bittersweet it had tasted with death only a few breaths away but the possibility of love in a handclasp in the dark.
He and Billy received the cargo without incident and placed it away from the larger crate to keep the boat in balance. The grappling hooks were thrown down. Billy expertly caught and tied them, while Carne secured the crates to the deck. Wet rope scraped his palms as he tied knots his tas had taught him even before Carne was large enough to work on the Magpie. He took his place at one oar, and Billy at the other, and they headed back toward shore.
The rain whipped Carne’s face, nearly blinding him, and the sky was as dark as night. The fires on shore that the women and children kept lit despite the rain were beacons to aim for. Carne steered toward them, shouting at Billy to pull hard on his side to keep the boat away from Cormoran’s Shite.
The squeal of rock rending wood rose above the sound of the storm as the boat lurched and dragged. Christ, he’d crossed this cove a thousand times in his life and never so much as bumped the boulder. Now the waves drove him into it faster than he and Billy could row away.
Carne half rose from his seat and pushed hard with the oar against the rock. His shoulder wrenched and the boat turned at the same moment a wave knocked it against solid stone. The frame shuddered, and wood screeched as it tore asunder. Seawater gushed up from the rent in the boat, wetting his boots from below.
The vessel tilted drunkenly this way and that before listing heavily. A wave washed over the leeward side of the boat, sweeping Billy along with it. The grizzled sailor grabbed hold of the edge as he fell overboard. Carne lunged toward him, and his feet slipped out from under him. He pitched toward the water, grasping at rope, wood, anything to keep him from falling.
He had time to draw one deep breath before plunging into the icy sea. It closed over his head, filling his ears, eyes, and nose. He pushed his arms and kicked his legs, struggling to reach the surface, his heavy clothes pulling him down. His left foot caught on something sharp, a jagged board of the boat or perhaps an outcropping of stone. When he kicked free, a sharp pain shot up his leg. His lungs ached, and his limbs were so heavy with cold he had to force them to churn through the water. If he could only reach the surface, he’d find Billy, and together they’d swim for shore or be hauled up on one of the skiffs.
But the relentless ocean kept sucking him away from the surface and toward the sea while pieces of wood from the shattered boat tumbled around him. His chest burned with the need for air, and he could hardly tell whether he was swimming up or down. Something hard bashed into his head and in his muddled mind, Carne had one clear thought.
I’m going to die like my father. This is what the end feels like. I didn’t know.
And on the heels of that: I wish I’d said a proper good-bye to Phillip.
Chapter Twenty-five
The rain pelted his hat and his glasses, and he had trouble seeing. When Phillip gave up and pulled his glasses off, the world turned into a series of blurry lumps, but even he could see the beach teemed with people and activity. In the middle of a rainstorm?
“Ooh, I have to get to work,” Robin said.
“What the devil is going on?” Phillip grabbed the youth’s arm before he could escape. “Why are there people on the beach?”
“A ship just off shore. One of our Frenchies,” Robin shouted over the sound of rain and waves. “Got in early, I’ll bet you, or late. Nobody ever tells me anything. Phew, and what a day for it. The French fools should’ve gone to a sheltered deepwater cove. They should wait for better weather, impatient bastards.” He shook off Phillip’s grip. “I have to find Mitchell. He’s vanished. Who knows what he’ll do today?”
“Is Carne here?”
“Probably.” Robin slipped away, as Mitchell already had, into the flurry of activity on the beach and the shroud of rain.
The wind seemed to decrease slightly, so Phillip pulled his glasses from his inside jacket pocket. Better with them than without, he decided, even as he peered with some difficulty through rain-speckled lenses. He wished he had a notebook so he could write down what he saw and heard on this hidden little beach. Although his material was gone. The book also gone. The vague half-formed dreams of Carne, gone.
He backed up into the shelter of a rock to watch the people and make plans. Step one, reinvent himself again. He might not have Carne, but he absently composed a list of what he did have: good health, wealth, all his own teeth, a very wet suit of clothes, a shattered camera, a battered motorcar, and a broken heart.
Nonsense, he briskly reminded himself. One can’t suffer a broken heart after only a few days’ acquaintance. And the rest of his misfortune? Things that could be replaced or meant nothing. The lost photos, though…
This back-and-forth between the two arguing halves of himself, poor Phillip versus buck up, lucky Phillip, would have gone on for quite a while if there hadn’t been a sudden whistle from the edge of the water.
He stumbled forward to see what the new commotion was about. Everyone seemed to be craning their necks, staring out to sea, pointing and gesturing.
He wiped his glasses yet again and studied the rough ocean. Was the French ship leaving? There didn’t appear to be any more small boats clustered at its side like so many piglets beside a sow. The way the last of the small crafts climbed and plunged through the swells as they neared shore made him feel positively seasick.
Carne might be out there. What fools they were to take such risks. He couldn’t bear it if someone he loved died at sea, and he certainly couldn’t imagine going out on the water ever again if such a thing happened.
The French ship seemed to be moving. Yes, it seemed to grow smaller, moving farther from shore. That was a relief. It seemed to him far too easy for the waves to toss anything against the formations of boulders that littered the seaside as if left behind by a careless, messy giant.
Impatiently, he whipped off his glasses, made another attempt to dry them and put them back on again. What was going on? Were they trying to retrieve a lost crate in this foul weather?
He moved into the wind again and tried to pick out shouts between the sounds of the storm and waves. A woman Phillip didn’t recognize pointed at the corner of the cove. He froze rooted with terror when he heard what she shouted to her friend. “Crowder’s boat…gone. Crowder and Treleaven too.”
He ran across the sand, going nightmarishly slow, panting from effort and panic. He yelled. “Where? What happened?”
The two women, one thin, one plump, only stared at him and didn’t answer. He shouted louder, “Where is Treleaven?”
The larger woman turned and pointed at a place where the rocks and water met, a spot of furious boiling foam. “There’s the last anyone saw of him.” The skinnier woman pushed a strand of wet hair from her face and rubbed at her red cheek with a corner of her shawl.
“Why aren’t they going to find him?”
“They’ve already searched close as they dare to Cormoran’s Shite. There’s nothing more anyone can do. Waves are heaving worse by the minute. Men might go along the shore, but not in boats. Not in that water.”
“’Tis suicide,” the other woman confirmed, then shot him an uneasy glance. “Are you his professor?”
He nodded, but he couldn’t speak. Suicide. The place they’d last seen Carne meant death.
Phillip’s shoes filled with wet sand, his clothes plastered to his body, but he only noticed these facts because they slowed him as he strode across the beach toward the edge of the ocean. Some things bobbed up in the water, and men waded cautiously in to grab them.
Bits of flotsam and jetsam, more debris, a whole crate, a longer piece of wood. “Oh God.” Phillip groaned and nearly collapsed. That broken length of wood had come from a boat.
His heart thumped too hard and fast for him to breathe properly so, as he slogged toward the crowd. He couldn’t call out to ask if they knew what they’d found and what he could do to help.
As he approached the knot of men standing at the edge of the waves, someone saw him and shouted out something about a stranger. But someone else said, “That’s Carne’s professor.”
Phillip stared at the water and reflected bitterly how true it was. He belonged to Carne. Only a few days together, and he belonged to the man. If Carne was gone, so was a piece of Phillip.
The people on the beach studied him, and he gestured impatiently at the water. Stop staring at me and find Carne.
But then he saw something ominous. “What is that?”
The lumpish form appeared between waves again, and Phillip swayed for a second. It appeared to be a body. He ran toward the water, and other men splashed behind him.
The body was facedown. A dead man. Phillip had to get to the body. He began to swim. Waves tossed over him, pulled him around, and when he could hear through the water in his ears, someone was calling him a fool. A man with a rope tied around his middle swam near him. Voices, or perhaps only one voice, yelled for him to get back to shore or be sucked out to sea.
He obeyed because they didn’t need to be fishing more people from the water, and because the man with the rope had reached the body and grabbed it tight.
Phillip made it back to the shore. He hadn’t lost his glasses despite the waves smacking his face—they had only driven the glasses down harder onto the bridge of his nose, which ached. He was bruised and had a cut where something sharp had smashed against his forehead.
He stood at the edge of the ocean, hands on knees, panting and dripping seawater, rainwater, and tears, grateful no one paid him any heed. They’d all hurried to the body.
A cry went up: Billy Crowder was dead.
Phillip straightened. Billy Crowder, poor fellow…but he wasn’t Carne.
Phillip stared at the driving waves and watched a bobbing chunk of wood skitter to and fro on the water, noting how it moved to the south with each bob of a new wave, toward the rocks at the southern side of the inlet.
Why weren’t the men going there? They were busy with Billy. Several held the rope wrapped around the man—Trennick, Phillip realized—who was wading out to grab some crates.
Phillip ran toward them and gestured at the rocks. “Why aren’t you looking there?”
“Slippery and jagged underwater,” one of the men said, one of the few who wore full rain gear.
“But that might be where Treleaven is, and we must go—”
The man in rain gear didn’t look at him. “I told you. Rocks are always treacherous, worse in a storm.”
A bearded man behind him, also holding Trennick’s rope, added, “The water’s mean over there.”
“Only way he’d survive is if the rock giants come alive and rescue him.”
Someone halfway into the surf yelled something like “Aaayah now,” and they scrambled backwards, hauling the rope, pulling Trennick back to shore.
Phillip stayed long enough to see that Trennick only clasped a crate in his arms. Then he turned and ran to the edge of the sand and began to climb on the rocks. A strong gust of wind hit him. He sank down and crawled on his hands and knees so he wouldn’t be swept off the rocks. Incoming waves crashed against them, boiled around them, and drenched him in spray.
His foot stuck between two rocks, and as he leaned over to free it, his luck with his glasses ended. They slid off his face.
“I don’t have time for this nonsense,” he shouted as he felt around for them in a small pool of rain and seawater. His hand had almost gone numb with cold by the time he struck another hard object, not a shell this time.
He restored the now cold and slightly crooked glasses to his face and continued the climb along the rocks, pausing to look back to the shore. Nothing new seemed to be going on, though some villagers pointed out to sea toward the spot where the French ship had been anchored.
He squinted in that direction and noticed a dot growing larger. Another smaller boat came toward them, though it wouldn’t head for that beach, he reckoned, not with such unpredictable gusts of winds and strong surf.
Why the hell hadn’t Carne paid attention to the weather? Why would anyone risk their lives for objects? He grew annoyed to realize he was crying again. Phillip had no particular masculine pride about maintaining a stiff upper lip, but weeping was a nuisance at the moment. So much water came from sea spray and the rain, more from him made life and his task harder.
He paused long enough to draw a wet sleeve over a wet face and then continued his climb along the rocks, wondering why he thought such a thing could help anyone. Even if he found Carne, how would he fish him out of the water? He climbed because inaction had been impossible. He couldn’t stay on that beach and wait a moment longer.
Rather than cry useless tears, he raged aloud instead. “Carne, you bloody fool,” he howled. “Why the devil did you do this to me? Why did you do it to yourself, you stubborn idiot?”
He stopped again to look back at the shore and the fires. There seemed fewer objects bouncing in the surf. People still clustered around Billy Crowder. Others looked out over the water at the boat that made its way toward the Mitchells’ own cove.
That had to be Gwalather and Mitchell, he thought, and half hoped Mitchell the younger had seen the boat so he might go meet the men and stomp them into a pulp. Phillip wished he could beat the thing that had hurt him to his core. Mitchell could take his anger out on people. Phillip must curse fates and the sea and Carne.
He shouted again, angry and hopeless. “Carne Treleaven, I could kill you, you bastard. How dare you make me care and then throw me away? And then die? How dare you?”
The wind and rain had died back enough so that the roar of the surf was loud. That last big gust of wind that sent him to his knees might have been a farewell puff.
A seagull gave a soft cry.
But that couldn’t be. Didn’t seagulls travel inland during a large storm? “Damnation, bird, doesn’t anything in this godforsaken village have any goddamned sense?”
He waited and listened to the waves, the patter of rain and another faint cry, which seemed a response to him, or perhaps someone at the beach. So he yelled again, a satisfying roar of “Carne,” then stopped and listened. The gull cried once more, and Phillip worked his way along the rocks.
A seagull? Or a person?
He called out and waited again. What the man on the beach had said drifted back to mind. The professor in him couldn’t help dredging up the local stories of giants who’d turned to rocks and someday would turn back into living creatures to defend the shores.
Legend be damned. Phillip knew he’d turn to rock after this day—if he didn’t get washed out to sea.
The worst of the storm had ended and the surf receded by the time he made it around the edge of a jutting band of rocks, yet he still felt the sting of spray on his face and tasted the salt on his lips. The beach was out of sight and he heard nothing but the waves now—the rain had turned to a misting sort of drizzle again, cold and unpleasant but no longer a fierce enemy.
Phillip had grown hoarse calling out for Carne or the seagull. He no longer heard a response. He inched along the rocks because what else could he do? Wait on the
shore? Go to his car and leave Par Gwynear forever? No, and no. Not until he knew what had become of Carne. Not until he witnessed a body for himself—alive and injured or dead. The very thought of that made his stomach lurch.
When he saw the scrap of cloth he thought it was a fish’s belly. By the time he’d cleaned his glasses for the thousandth time on his soaking handkerchief, he’d understood it was man-made.
And then he knew he saw a shirt. He slipped and climbed down the rocks onto the pebbly shore, muttering a cursing when he slashed his hand, the same one he’d hurt before in what seemed another life. But he didn’t let pain or dripping blood slow him down as he ran and slid over stones and crushed shells to the figure sprawled at the edge of the surf.
Carne lay in the water, but at least he lay faceup.
Phillip had been screaming curses to God often in the last few minutes but now he shouted pleas. “Please, please be alive. Please let him be alive, God, please.”
For the few seconds it took to reach Carne he made silent promises and offered childish exchanges. It would be worth it if Carne chased him off or denounced him. Let his own hand grow infected. Anything. Just so he’s alive.
When he drew near, he saw Carne’s coat and shirt were ripped and the exposed flesh gleamed far too pale. But then miracle of miracles, Carne’s head moved, rolling to the side. Phillip dropped to his knees beside him as the brown eyes opened and Carne coughed out a mouthful of water. Phillip lifted his head so he wouldn’t choke.
After emptying some seawater from his lungs, Carne drew a ragged breath and rasped, “You came back!”
“So I did.”
Carne’s smile was wide enough to show his teeth “I’m not a seagull,” he said. “I wanted to say goodbye. That’s what I wanted most.” His face went slack.
“Carne!” Phillip shouted. “Carne Treleaven, get back here at once, sir. Now.” But no matter what he said, Carne didn’t open his eyes.