The Toll of the Sea

by Theresa Murphy

  ‘I’ll take you home, Bella,’ he shouted, concern for her on his face. To her right was the body of the woman in the scarlet dress. Lionel had laid the body beside that of the soldier. For Arabella there was poignancy in them being companions in death, even though it was not of their choosing.

  Men were still moving in among the rocks on Arabella’s left. They judged the movement of the waves as they went in search of more bodies. She saw that some twenty-five had already been laid out. Most were soldiers, but there were a few women and some smaller bodies that a sorrowful Arabella had to accept were those of children.

  ‘Come along, Bella,’ Lionel urged her, reaching out clasping both her hands and easing her up onto her feet.

  Aware that he was anxious to get her home as quickly as possible, Arabella tried to object verbally, but no sound would come out of a throat she discovered was agonizingly sore.

  She made gestures, pointing to her throat to indicate why she couldn’t speak, then conveying her determination to stay to help on the beach. Both of them were chilled to the bone, their sodden clothing as heavy on them as suits of armour, but they exchanged weak smiles, so close that they could communicate without speaking. Then they made their weary-legged way down to where the angry sea was as ready as ever to fight to keep its victims.

  There were so many of them that momentarily Arabella wilted. Scornful of herself for her own flash of weakness, she put out a hand to clutch Lionel’s, and they waded back in among the rocks.

  Close to them, wedged in under a large, flat rock, was a middle-aged woman with a round face and chubby cheeks. Her hair was held in a bun, and there was a smile frozen on her lips that Arabella found perturbing. Nevertheless, she took up a position opposite Lionel, each of them taking a plump shoulder and pulling. But their effort had no effect because something was trapping the body in under the rock. They were about to try once more when a loud shout stopped them.

  Retaining the hold they had on the body, both Arabella and Lionel turned to where the man who had shouted was entering the water. Although the person approaching was clad from head to foot in oilskin as a protection against the weather, Arabella recognized Gray Sawtell, a hard-faced fisherman who was rumoured to be the leader of Adamslee’s smuggling gang. Aged around forty, the taciturn Sawtell lived a semi-reclusive life in a small cottage that was precariously perched on the precipitous cliff on the eastern side of the village.

  Sawtell’s shout had been directed at her, and she clutched at a rock as she moved away to allow the two men to bend and gradually free the body of the woman from under the rock. Glancing over his shoulder to see Arabella watching the grim proceedings, the fishermen shouted at her again, ‘Look away, woman! For God’s sake turn your eyes from this!’

  The commanding way in which the order was shouted made Arabella instinctively obey. But then a spark of annoyance ignited anger in her. All her life she had been afraid of Gray Sawtell, seeing his difference from other more sociable men as a threat. But now, after the traumatic hours she had already spent in the water with Lionel, she wasn’t prepared to let Sawtell order her around.

  Turning defiantly, she watched as the overweight body of the woman was pulled clear of the rock by Lionel and Sawtell. Then she saw a sight that made her fervently wish that she had complied with Sawtell’s order. Having to fight to stifle a scream, she couldn’t avert her eyes from a dreadful scene. Clinging to the woman, making sure that they would be with their mother through the tunnel into the unknown, were three small children. Lionel was standing upright, and Arabella could tell that he was swaying because of emotion rather than the waves that were breaking over his shoulders. Seeing Sawtell bend and tenderly prise the fingers of the children from their mother’s dress, Arabella felt guilty when she realized that the tough fisherman had known what was attached to the woman before he had first shouted, having tried hard to spare her the distress she was now feeling.

  It took a tremendous effort to recover but then Arabella was wading towards the two men, her tears unnoticed as they joined rain and seawater to flow down her face. She stooped to pick up the first little body. It was a boy. His face, which should have been young and happy, was aged by an expression of terror that was fixed upon it. Carrying the lad ashore, it seemed to Arabella that she was holding an old man who had been squeezed into the body of a child.

  Lionel and Sawtell brought the other two children to the beach with their mother. They were girls, pretty children who gave the impression of being twins until Arabella judged that at least two years must separate them. Not that age now mattered to them.

  She was astonished and shamed by her formed-from-a-distance opinion of Sawtell when she saw him smooth the hair of the girls into place as he stretched them out beside their mother. His face, ruggedly handsome, betrayed the sorrow he was feeling.

  Unable to continue looking at the tragic family, Arabella turned her gaze back to the sea. A man’s body was in close, rising and falling in the water, occasionally colliding jarringly with a rock. Steeling herself, she made her way slowly to the water, determined to secure this body while Lionel and Sawtell finished laying out the mother and children.

  The body was that of a young man, but he was not in uniform. Floating on his back, he had long yellow hair that flowed out from his head to form a poorly shaped halo. She stepped into the water then held back until a wave at the end of its long run broke up around her on the shore. Then, lying on her stomach across a rock, she reached out to the body. The nearest part of it was a hand, and Arabella felt that there was something creepy about touching it. She preferred the dead to offer a much less personal arm, shoulder, or leg. But she had no option. Forcing herself to keep her eyes open, Arabella took the heavy, long-fingered hand of the young man in hers.

  For one moment she felt a strange, fearful elation in the certainty that she had felt a fleeting tightening of the fingers she was holding. The trauma of it all was getting to her, she scolded herself. What she had detected in the hand could be no more than a post-death reflex action. Yet the shock of it cleared the apprehension she had been feeling. She was relieved to find that the eyes of the dead no longer disturbed her. His were startling blue. As it had been with the previous corpses it was easy to accept that he was staring at her.

  Pulling the body closer to the rock, finding that she still didn’t want to be alone with the dead, she looked over her shoulder to see if either Lionel or Sawtell were about to join her. They weren’t. The two men were standing side-by-side, each with a hand up to shield his eyes as they peered out to where the sound of a sharp cracking signalled that the ship was disintegrating further.

  Pushing up a little from the rock that was painful against her ribs, Arabella kept hold of the hand. She shuddered as she looked into the blue eyes that were now closer to her. There was something peculiar about them. The eyes of the dead had no depth. It was as if a door had been closed at the back of them. This pair of blue eyes was different in some indefinable sense. Accepting that she was fooling herself, dismissing what she thought she was seeing, Arabella suddenly changed her mind. Now she was aware beyond all doubt. She could not be mistaken! The man in the water was definitely looking up at her.

  Arabella discovered that her voice had returned. She could shout, but it would cause her throat excruciating agony to do so. Her voice was working, but the two men on the beach wouldn’t hear her. So she waved her arm wildly and Lionel saw her. He touched Sawtell on the shoulder and the two of them came running towards her.

  ‘This man is alive!’ Arabella yelled at them.

  ‘Impossible,’ Lionel shouted back, as he and Sawtell came into the sea, the face of the latter showing his unspoken disbelief.

  Sawtell bent to look down at the yellow-haired man, ignoring Lionel’s shouted warning as an extra-large wave came in at them. Holding tightly to each other, Arabella and Lionel, though battered by the sea, managed to keep on their feet. The unprepared Sawtell fared less well. After being tossed between two ove
rhanging rocks he disappeared under the swirling water.

  Making sure that Arabella was safely holding onto a rock, Lionel waded to where he expected the fisherman to surface, ready to help him out of the sea. But Sawtell came up out of the water a little way off. He was holding the yellow-haired man and his chisel-featured face was animated as he shouted to Arabella and Lionel, ‘This man is alive, by God!’

  Two

  ADAMSLEE HOUSE WAS a large and imposing porticoed white building set back cautiously some seventy yards from the edge of the sheer cliff west of the village. The original house had been built on 600 acres of Devon land given to Francis Adams by James I of England. Since that time the Adamses had been the predominant family in the district, with the males successively being the squires. In deference to the gentry, the villagers stayed clear of the Adams’ home in daylight, while only the drunk or the nerveless went near the reputedly haunted house at night. The present house was the second built on the site. A century earlier the incumbent Oliver Adams had been crazy enough to deliberately set fire to his home, and stupid enough to perish in the conflagration of his own making. The second house constructed round the surviving chimney of the earlier building was a feeble parody of its rebirth.

  Yet now the Adams dynasty was without a male heir, and doomed to extinction, as the voluptuous Sarai Adams was the last in the long line. Should she, as was eminently possible, have issue out of wedlock, then the family name would survive, but with the brand of bastardy.

  As dawn broke to bring the night of the great storm to a close, Sarai stood looking out of a window on the upper floor of the three-storey house. Rain still splashed heavily against the glass and the wind still blew but not so fiercely. The cliff cut off her view at an angle, but she could see about one-third of what was left of the Paloma.

  In the courtyard below she could see the diminutive figure of Ben Morely, her conscientious groom. He was exercising the horses in a sheltered section of the yard. Caesar, her stallion, was easily distinguishable in the gloomy light of that miserable morning.

  Looking down at the seething sea around the rocks and what remained of the ship, she sadly assumed that the night had claimed many lives. She pondered on what the events of the night had meant. She felt that it had brought her dead parents closer to her. Not in an otherworldly way, but as a hint of what family life could have been had they not drowned in the Irish Sea during a similar storm. Sarai had been but a child then, and she was frustrated by not knowing whether she had a true memory of her mother and father or if what she believed was recall owing everything to the portraits of them hanging in the hall in Adamslee House.

  They had both possessed the sophistication and respectability expected in a squire and his lady. This often caused Sarai to puzzle as to how she had come by her near immorality and outright rebelliousness. The old changeling myth of a passing gypsy exchanging her baby for an aristocratic child couldn’t apply in Sarai’s case, as she had inherited her father’s lean, strong jaw.

  Nonetheless, Sarai wasn’t complaining, as she was arrogantly proud to acknowledge, about what it took to drive just about every man she met wild. In addition she had a singing voice that, though below classical standard, meant she was in demand at aristocratic social functions. During her six months in Paris, which had ended the previous autumn, she had lived in the Rue de Lille and had gained many admirers when performing at some grand house where she had gone for the evening. Sarai basked in the applause her singing promoted.

  Dragging her mind away from the much-enjoyed acclaim of last year and back to the present, she thought of how the storm had prevented a small fortune in contraband being brought to the cellars below her house. Yet it had only postponed that exercise. Once the wind had died away and a fresh-born moon had grown to a quarter, then a caravan of small, fully laden ponies would wind its way up the smugglers’ paths from the caves at the foot of the cliffs.

  This would be a closing stage in an operation that had begun out at sea in Gray Sawtell’s ketch, the Dark Rose. From Adamslee House the smuggled goods would be carried, usually concealed in haycarts, to the City of Exeter and the developing towns of the area.

  With an inheritance that included property in Ireland, Sarai had no financial interest in the smuggling. All she looked for was the excitement of the contradictory thrill she achieved from cheating a system that she, as a member of the upper class, was a part of.

  Another attraction, which waxed and waned for Sarai according to her mood, was the rough and ready, habitually silent Gray Sawtell. Widely separated by class, the two of them were drawn together by lust. Neither she nor he had any illusions about their relationship. Aware that Sawtell expected their loving to end when she tired of him, Sarai had to admit, to herself but not Sawtell, that he probably had it about right. What was likely to keep them together was her enjoyment at being involved in smuggling. That would end one day, too. The Revenue officers now had specially designed pursuit craft and orders to shoot on sight.

  In what she recognized as her saner moments, when her all wasn’t throbbing with excitement as she gave herself and the cellars of her house to the smuggling cause, Sarai clearly saw that she was risking her liberty, perhaps even her life. But the game was addictive and she found it impossible to pull out.

  Believing that she could see a figure making its way along the ‘Brandy Pad’, as the smugglers called the clifftop path, she quickly used a hand to wipe away the mist her breath had painted on the windowpane, and she saw that she had been right. When he was close enough, Sarai recognized him as he stepped out of a veil of rain. Worry replaced the light-hearted curiosity with which she had watched the man advance. It was John Nichol, the Customs man who was stationed permanently in the village.

  Sarai had two conflicting theories, one comforting, the other slightly perturbing. Right now her cellars were totally empty, so even if Nichol had been informed that she was involved with the smuggling then he would find nothing to incriminate her. But weighed against that was the fact that the Customs man had walked all the way up from the village in such atrocious weather. That meant that whatever his purpose it was of significant importance.

  Sarai had met John Nichol just once, when he had been among her guests at the New Year’s ball she had held at Adamslee House. He was a stocky, balding fellow with a round, plain face that at first suggested unintelligence. But Sarai had learned that her impression was mistaken when she danced with him, just as she had danced with other guests such as the Sheriff of Devon, and found that the Customs man had a razor-sharp mind.

  Remembrance of that ball came back now. She had escaped the limp-wristed grasp of overly polite dancers to go out of the french-windows into the energetically muscular embrace of Gray Sawtell. An erotic delight for her out under the stars, as a dalliance with the rough fisherman in the ballroom would have caused an acute embarrassment.

  So hopelessly lost had Sarai become in the smuggler’s arms that night that she had misjudged the time. Dashing into the house, she had managed to run to her bedroom and change out of the dress Sawtell had ruined, and then rejoin her guests, smiling with a fake serenity, to see the old year out and the New Year in. She’d had to pretend enjoyment when the champagne corks had popped, streamers had been sent spiralling across the room, and kisses exchanged, because that night had earlier climaxed for her in the wonderland she had shared with Sawtell.

  A sudden realization moved Sarai back from the window. She was starkly aware that she couldn’t allow Elsa, her maid, to answer the door and then innocently reply to any cunning questions put by Nichol.

  Running down the curved staircase that was surmounted by a magnificent glass dome, she passed the portraits of her curious ancestors peering out of their yesterdays into her today. As she went by a bewigged Oliver Adams, she communicated silently with the lunatic arsonist. Sarai silently pleaded: if you are haunting this place, Oliver dear, then frighten this man from my door.

  On opening the door she had to cling to i
t as the wind took charge. Unable to wait for a polite invitation to enter, Nichol leapt across the threshold, to take the door from her and close it. Taking a handkerchief from his pocket, he wiped his wet face with it before honkingly blowing his nose, then giving her a half smile in which the right side of his face didn’t participate. His cheek remained still, a drooping to it noticeable by the dragging down of the corner of his mouth.

  Seeing the semi-lifeless face jogged Sarai’s memory. She had been told Nichol had been seriously injured when single-handedly tackling a notorious family of smugglers at Beer in the east of the county. Bravery was a factor that Sarai looked for in a man, and remembering the story of Nichol’s courage raised him in her estimation.

  ‘Forgive the somewhat ungentlemanly entrance, Miss Adams,’ he apologized with a stiff little bow.

  ‘It isn’t exactly a day for protocol to be observed, Mr Nichol,’ she replied, ‘so an apology is unnecessary.’

  He gave a second small bow. ‘You are most gracious. Indeed, Miss Adams, it’s a terribly sad day.’

  ‘I have heard nothing, nothing of what took place in the night,’ Sarai explained.

  Having difficulty in finding words, he looked at her long and dolefully before saying, ‘Oh dear, oh dear. Then I have to give you the terrible news, Miss Adams, and I fear that it will mightily distress you.’

  ‘Was there considerable loss of life?’ Sarai asked, moved by the incipient tears in his eyes and the catch in his voice.

  ‘May the Lord help and succour us all, Miss Adams,’ Nichol said hoarsely, ‘for they are counting the dead in hundreds, literally hundreds, Miss Adams. I have seen the long lines of the poor wretches lying on the beach. She was a troopship, but there are many women and dear little children among those who perished.’