Seacliff

by Andrews, Felicia

  Marvelous … and sad.

  Sad, because she wondered then if he would ever really be happy living among the gentry, running a valley and a vast landed estate the way her father had done. She laid her cheek against his arm and closed her eyes, listening to the sound of his breathing; it matched the rhythm of the waves breaking against the jetty’s pointed finger and along its slick, rocky sides.

  He must have sensed her melancholy, for he put his arm around her shoulders and hugged her once, tightly, before shifting slightly so her head would be on his shoulder.

  “Sleep,” he whispered. “Unless we run into the Royal Navy, we’ll be at Seacliff before midnight.”

  This time the tide had ebbed and had left a trail of hard-packed sand, shells and dark strands of kelp in its wake. A few of the men woke before mid-afternoon and explored the rocks as far as they dared climb. They returned to sharpen and clean their weapons, using whetstones on their daggers and shirttails on their muskets. Their armory was hardly overwhelming, but their skill was great. They saw very little difference between braining a hog for slaughter and a man for revenge; it was all the same to them, and they were beginning to feel restless.

  Terry Wyndym had a nightmare. In it a massive wave rose out of the bay and thundered across the valley, sweeping all before it, leaving only him and Caitlin Evans behind—and Caitlin held a dagger that shone like polished diamonds and was pointed at his gut.

  Griffin dozed but did not sleep. The cries of sea birds wheeling from their cliff nests spoke to him of freedom, and of capture; a play of large fish beyond the breakers made him wonder what it would be like to spend one’s entire life in a world colored in shades of green, blue, and cold, relentless black; and staring at the slimy sides of the boulders and at the stark blacks and browns made him conjure up an image of the ruins of Falconrest. Not one of the handful of messages he’d received since the fire mentioned the fate of his steward, Richard Jones. But he knew. He knew beyond doubt that Jones was dead. The man would have stayed to fight either the torchers or the blaze, and since he most likely encountered the former, he probably wasn’t allowed to leave the scene alive.

  Griffin was sitting with his back against a rock, Caitlin still snuggled softly under his arm. Every few minutes he would stroke her arm or hair absently, and for a considerable length of time speculated on a life shared with her. It certainly wouldn’t be easy. Such a volatile mind as hers was constantly shifting from one decision to another at a dizzying pace. He smiled to himself. It would not be easy, but it certainly wouldn’t be dull.

  He shifted slightly and lifted his right hand to shade his eyes against the reddening glare of the sun. Clouds. He was sure there were clouds building across the horizon. He blinked, and they were gone. He closed his eyes and dozed, awakening only when he felt a twilight breeze caressing his cheek, a breeze that carried with it the decided scent of rain.

  Caitlin sighed when she felt herself shaken, rubbed the heels of her hands over her eyes to drive off sleep. When she sat up, however, she groaned as she encountered the stiffness of her hip and the tingling of her right leg. She stretched, kissed Griffin’s cheek quickly and would have asked him if he had rested at all, but the ominously thoughtful look in his eyes stopped her.

  “What is it?” she said.

  He lifted his face toward the sky. She looked, and her lips tightened.

  The sun was already down, the day’s blue now indigo and black. Instead of stars she saw only mountains of clouds slipping down from the north with dark gray summits and blackened bases. And at the horizon, where there was still some light, she saw tendrils of rain fall toward the water. The swells were already high, the tide coming in fast, and the lullaby of the breakers had turned to a low grumbling. “The rain will overtake us,” Griffin said, climbing awkwardly to his feet and pulling her up with him.

  “We still daren’t travel by land,” she said. “At the first alarm we’d be lost.”

  “If we can’t reach the trails up the rocks, we’ll be lost just as well.”

  She wavered as she followed him back down to the beach, frowning when she saw the others already waiting by the boats.

  They had seen the approaching storm and had already made their decision; not even Terry Wyndym would suggest attacking a rifleman with a club.

  “Hard rowin’,” said Willy Jonson with a smile that was mostly bravado.

  Another slapped the side of his craft and laughed. “Never knew what it’d be like to drown sittin’ ’stead of swimmin’.”

  “Can you swim. Danny?” a third asked with a laugh.

  “Like a bloody fish, lad, like a bloody beautiful fish.”

  “Well, gentlemen,” Caitlin said into the general laughter, “let us pray we won’t have to test Danny’s word.”

  She knew then that they were not afraid. At every other step of the way they had always had alternatives. They could run. They could hide. They could stand and fight. Not now. They had broken from their safe cover in the mountains, had stolen from their own kind, and were less than four hours’ traveling time to homes from which they’d been exiled for months. Some of them would not live to see their families again. Yet they were eager to enter the foray.

  Griffin cleared his throat, ready to give the order, when suddenly Caitlin stayed him with a look and hurried down the beach to the first boat. There, to the startled and pleased amazement of all watching, she hugged the first man she came to and planted a kiss solidly on his mouth. He was flustered, and the men teased him, but by the time she had reached the second boat the other men had formed a ragged line and were waiting, brushing at their ragtag clothes, smoothing down their hair, wiping their lips on their sleeves. They said nothing. They kissed and hugged her in return, and not a few turned away with a glint of tears in their eyes.

  Terry Wyndym she saved for last. “Well, Terry,” she said neutrally. “M’lady,” he offered, his eyes downcast.

  “You’ll give me a chance to prove myself, then.”

  His blunt-toed boot scuffed the sand. “It’s crossed my mind.”

  “Did anything in particular change it?”

  “Martin told ye how to find us, didn’t he?” She nodded.

  “He’s been wrong afore, y’know.”

  “He has,” she admitted. “But he’s also taken a great lot of chances for you, and for the others. He’s taken a chance with me.”

  “Aye, I thought as much.” His chest heaved as he inhaled and released his breath. “I might as well, too.” The grin she saw in the dimming light was sheepish. “’Sides, if ye leave me here I’ll be stranded; I can’t swim.”

  A split second passed that filled her heart with hope; then she flung her arms around him and hugged him, held him, and whispered, “God be with you, Terrance Wyndym.”

  An embrace for Griffin, several minutes long and a lifetime too short, and she punched at the air. Immediately, they scrambled the boats into the rising water and leaped in, disdaining the sails in favor of the strength of their backs.

  It was a simple matter to break out of the jetty’s protection, but, once in open water again, they found some of the swells rising higher than their heads, the whitecaps showing sooner than before, and the wind picking up as the clouds plummeted toward them. The oarlocks protested, the keels groaned, and she was forced to hold the gunwales in a white-knuckled grip to keep from lurching over into the bay.

  The sky continued to darken, turning for several minutes at a time a shade of green laced with black. Gulls streaked over their heads, heading for the protection of the woodland or their cliffside nests. Spouts of foam rose into the air like spectral hands and were shattered like glass when the wind gusted. Caitlin found she could no longer look at either cliff or horizon; their rising and falling motion made her stomach queasy. So she watched the faces of the men pulling the oars: grim, hard-set, dripping with sea spray and flushed dark with exertion. Her own hands clenched and opened in her lap, as if they wanted to take an oar themselves. Her hair wh
ipped across her face, stinging her cheeks until finally she grabbed it and made a hasty braid that blew in the wind.

  “How bad will it be, Willy?” she said to the farmer when she saw him anxiously scanning the clouds.

  “How t’say, mistress,” he said, sitting beside her to grip the tiller. “Don’t hear no thunder, so lightning is a fair distance. But the wind…” He gave an exaggerated shudder she understood all too well. A strong wind would make their proposed landing all the more precarious.

  The minutes passed in hour-long spurts.

  Once the clouds had massed overhead, they rowed in almost total darkness, their only guide the sound of the waves against the rocks on their left.

  Caitlin was at the tiller now, both hands holding its slippery arm so hard her forearms trembled. Her eyes squinted as she sought the rocks, and signs of Seacliff, her head ached in the wind’s constant keening, and she felt more than once as if her shoulders would be pulled apart as a wave lifted them almost clear of the surface. She had to clench her jaw to keep from screaming.

  The first spatter of rain came just before midnight. The first squall spun them dangerously off course.

  But after it passed there was relative calm, and Jonson left an oar to give her a breathing spell. She nodded her thanks and cupped her hands around his ear: “Willy, we’re going to have to come in straight on.”

  He nodded his understanding. “Do you think we can do it?”

  The wind rose again, and when he jerked his head toward the tiller she grabbed it, gasping at the power of the sea as it rushed against the rudder. After regaining control, she tilted her head down while he cupped his hands around her ear. “If we don’t,” he shouted and still she barely heard him, “we’ll have to take a swim. I don’t fancy swimmin’, mistress, if ye don’t mind.”

  She laughed and mouthed him a kiss, shouted a warning to take care when several men from the bow exchanged places with the oarsmen. The boat heeled, righted itself, and was struck broadside by a wave no one saw coming. The world tilted crazily, water gushed whitely over the sides, and when the rudder lost its bite in the water, the sudden release threw Caitlin to the deck. She gasped and swallowed a mouthful of the sea, scrambled back to her place when the boat passed the wave’s crest and miraculously landed upright.

  A second swell battered them, and when that, too, had subsided, she stifled a horrified shout when she saw one oar swinging wildly in its lock. The man using it had been washed overboard. Silently. Without warning. And the sea had closed over him as if he’d never been.

  The black cliffs and the black sky, the black water and the black rain swirled around them.

  Wearily, she gave the tiller over to Jonson and slumped forward, her hands dangling over her knees and her mouth gasping for air. Incongruously, she remembered a fall afternoon when she was little more than seven. Her father had taken her to the teeming port of Cardiff where she had seen more ships, more sailors, more outright chaos than she’d ever imagined possible. A captain friend of her father’s offered to take them up the Bristol Channel when he sailed for London, leaving them off on a spit of rock opposite Land’s End in Cornwall. Though the vessel had moved slowly, the villages sliding past them on either side seeming to pass at little more than the speed of a fast walk, she had been so excited that she’d climbed onto a high coil of hawser and waved frantically at the few souls she saw on the shore.

  She’d nearly fallen overboard, and would have, had it not been for a quick-thinking first mate.

  “Lass,” he’d said, “ye’ve got to remember there’s more to failin’ than just hittin’ the water.”

  And even at that age she’d known what he’d meant—that there was all that turmoil and unfathomable depth beneath the surface, all the way to the bottom. She hadn’t known how to swim then, and the lesson was well learned.

  A jolt on the rudder forced her mind back to her job, and she beckoned to Jonson quickly. Pointing, she waited until he’d taken the tiller in his own hands before easing herself off the thwart and weaving her way to the naked mast in the center. There she stood, her arms wrapped tightly around the perilously thin post, staring into the darkness.

  Waiting.

  It seemed to her she had spent her entire life waiting.

  The wind lashed her, the rain increased and she felt nothing, and suddenly she stiffened.

  “There!” she screamed. And screamed, “There! There!” again. The oars paused and every head turned.

  Through the wind-driven rain, through the spray that splattered them, they could see lights shimmering atop the cliffs. And even in the darkness Caitlin could discern the brooding outline of Seacliff— like her… waiting.

  35

  They turned about at Caitlin’s insistence.

  With Seacliff towering so close above her, she suddenly felt the need to think, to worry, to take some valuable time and see where she might go wrong. And that could too easily be done, she thought as they breasted the relentlessly rolling swells and came about when they were only a mile from shore. She should have arranged for signals between the boats to be exchanged when they were positioned; she should have planned for alternate landing sites in case the tide was too high and the currents too powerful; she should have done a great many things, she knew, but it was too late to worry about it now. The other boats were invisible in the dark, perhaps even now making their way as close to the cliffs as they dared, seeking to land near those paths that wound all the way to the top.

  “M’lady,” Jonson said, puzzled.

  She motioned him silent as she stared up at the windows ablaze with lights and wondered what had been happening behind those walls.

  “M’lady, I beg you…”

  She unwrapped her arms slowly from the mast and braced her feet on the deck. The men stared up at her, wondering what next she wanted done. She said nothing to them. She only searched each face seen clearly or not, looking for the weakest link, the strongest, for the one who would panic at precisely the wrong moment. And when she failed, as she knew she would, she pulled the hastily fashioned braid over her shoulder and unplaited it. When her hair was free and streaming in the wind, she took hold of the mast again and nodded.

  “Now, Mr. Jonson,” she said firmly. “We go now.”

  The sea was far less taxing as they came about once again and headed in. The swells gave them momentum, and the oars served now as brakes to prevent them from spinning helplessly or being dashed murderously against the rocks. Bobbing, diving, climbing again, they rode the back of the sea toward the cliffs, Caitlin straining with those at the bow to spot the trail carved into the rock by the Norsemen who had built Seacliff’s wall centuries ago.

  She saw it then.

  As they sped down the face of a wave into a deep trough she saw a slight pale streak running up the face of the rock. When the boat rose, she lost it, then searched in panic and found it again, pointing it out to the men. A fair portion of it was under the water’s surface, and it was evident by the force of the tide against the stone that she had made a costly, stupid error. She had hoped to be able to come under the path, or alongside it, with the boat; but the only possible way they would be able to make it in was to bring the boat as close as they dared, and swim for shore. The stairs carved into the stone were wide and deep, and there were wooden railings lashed onto thin iron posts driven into the bedrock. These she could see more clearly as they approached the cliff. But how to get to them without being dashed to death?

  Jonson gave over the tiller to the man called Danny and came to stand beside her. His expression told her he saw the predicament at once, and they were silent for several minutes. “Well,” he said, “leastways, we ain’t got the rain.”

  Her nod was desultory. The rain had indeed stopped, and there were occasional narrow gaps in the clouds; but the wind stayed with them. The wind, and the breakers.

  “If we get too close, it’ll be like hammer and anvil and us between,” he said finally, a depth of sorrow in his voic
e that made her want to weep.

  “A few moments,” she said through her teeth. “Damn, if we only had a few moments we could…”

  She stopped, her voice trailing into the night wind. “M’lady?” Jonson peered closely at her, thinking she had reached the end of her tether. “M’lady?”

  “Willy,” she said, looking around the mast straight at him, “do you think we could leave this boat in less than a minute?” Jonson frowned. “Less than a minute?”

  “A minute. One minute. Less than half that, in fact.”

  He glanced around and shrugged. “If it means livin’ or gettin’ bashed, I’d say we could.”

  “Then grab hold, Mr. Jonson!” And she took the mast in both hands and began pulling, pushing, laughing when he saw her purpose and took hold of it, too.

  Nearer they moved; and the rocks took on definite shape.

  Nearer they got; and the lower floors of Seacliff above them vanished from view.

  Three men and Caitlin struggled with the mast, and though the others strained and shouted to keep the oars deep in the water and slow their progress, they moved inevitably, inexorably … nearer.

  A crackling noise like a thousand bolts of lightning shattered the air around them and the mast gave way sharply, spilling them all into the bottom of the boat. Jonson was calling out orders even before he got to his feet, and Caitlin was rushing toward the bow, the masthead in her grip, the rest of it held by those who came behind. It reminded her of nothing so much as a whaler’s harpoon, and their quarry towered above their heads implacably silent, while the sea demonically thundered around them.