by Anne Corlett
She’d brought him all this way.
She’d promised him a home.
She’d lost enough, surely. They’d all lost enough.
It doesn’t work that way, a little mocking voice told her.
She swore out loud, sending the gulls into a frenzy of glee, and then she started to run down the lane.
There was no sign of him in the first cove, or the second. She turned off the road and out onto the headland. She’d be able to see the whole stretch of shoreline from there.
“Fuck’s sake.” As she stumbled, a stopper of pent-up panic shook itself free, coming out as a volley of profanity. “Fuck. Shit. Shit.” She scrambled to the edge of the cliffs and stared along the shore.
“Finn.”
She shouted it again, conscious of the shrill leading edge of fear in her voice.
“Finn.”
She was suddenly very aware of the great expanse of open countryside around the village. Some roads would end at farms, with machinery lying about the place; other tracks would end at deep pools, or uncovered slurry pits. She might never even know what . . .
“Stop. Stop it. Stop it.”
She turned and ran back to the road.
When she reached the cottages, there was no sign of Callan.
The harbor.
As she rounded the kilns and emerged onto the harborside, her heart leaped at the sight of a tall figure standing on the curved wall, looking down onto the shore. And then her fear stepped in again.
A body on the sand.
Callan looking down, frozen in shock, trying to work out how to tell her she’d failed in a simple enough charge. Keep a cautious, quiet boy alive for a single night in a deserted village. But then she hadn’t managed to keep the other one alive—not even wrapped up inside her where he should have been as safe as anyone in the universe.
When Callan turned at the sound of her footsteps, she saw that he was holding a mug in his hand. He wouldn’t be standing there drinking coffee if Finn was lying down there on the rocks.
“Finn’s been busy.” He jerked his head down toward the beach.
“He . . . what?” She stared at him.
Callan gave her a bemused look. “What’s wrong?”
“You’ve seen him? Where is he?”
Callan gestured again. “Down there.”
Jamie lurched to the edge of the harbor. Finn was crouched on the shore, frowning in concentration. The wet sand in front of him was covered in fragments of glass and pottery, each one carefully placed, equidistant from its neighbors.
“Finn.” Relief was ragged in her voice, and Callan gave her a sharp glance.
Finn looked up, his frown deepening. “It’s not finished.”
The fragments. There was a shape to them. They flowed in lines and curls and wrapped around on themselves, like some hybrid of Celtic spirals and Roman mosaic.
“A horse,” she said. “It’s a horse.”
“It’s for you. I went back for more pieces.”
Her fear was trying to reshape itself as anger. She could shout at Finn for frightening her, or at Callan, because he hadn’t somehow read her mind and come to find her before she’d worked herself into a frenzy. But the shreds of her self-control had knitted back together just enough for her to recognize that it was so much easier to blame someone else, and so much harder to unravel your emotions and think, It happened, that’s all.
“You okay?” Callan was still watching her.
She forced her fingers to uncurl.
“I couldn’t find him. I was worried.”
His eyes searched her face, clearly finding more there than in her brief explanation.
“Finn.” The lad glanced up. “Tell Jamie where you’re going next time, won’t you?”
Finn nodded.
Easy as that. Why was it never like that for her?
“Hey.” Callan’s voice was gentle, and she looked up. “It’s okay. He’s safe. You’re all safe. You made it.”
“I know.” Down on the sand, Finn was adding another piece to the horse’s tail. “But it doesn’t feel like we’re safe, or finished. It feels like there’s still something I should be doing.”
He gave her an amused look. “That’s the thing, isn’t it? You’re never done. Otherwise, what’s the point? If you woke up one day and realized you’d done everything you needed to do, you’d be finished, wouldn’t you? Time to move on to whatever comes next.”
“Do you believe there’s something that comes next?”
He shrugged. “No idea. I’m kind of hoping it’s a fair few years before I have to find out.”
“Is it really that easy for you?” There was a hint of resentment in her tone, and his eyebrows went up.
“Who said anything about easy? But it’s all you can do, isn’t it? Live today. Then the next day. And the one after that. Unless you’re inclined to jump off the nearest cliff, of course, but surviving is fairly addictive. Do it once and you get more determined to keep on doing it.”
She shook her head slowly. If he’d said all this last night, she’d have looked up at the stars and thought, Yes, that’s it. But now her old uncertainty was shouldering its way in again. Was this how it was for everyone? Little moments of being sure, of fitting into the world around you, all strung together on a flimsy thread of doubt and confusion and not belonging?
“So one step at a time,” she said.
“One step, one breath. For now, anyway. No point spending today worrying about tomorrow, because the big things tend to come crashing in with no warning.” He gave a small, ironic smile. “End of the world, that sort of thing.” He took a sip of his coffee. “And when something big does come out of left field, you need to take time to take stock. Someone’s tipped the box up, and maybe some of the pieces are lost under the floor . . .”
Gracie told him about the jigsaw, then.
“. . . and you’re not going to get it all back together in one go. That’s what they’re trying to do, back on Alegria. They think it’ll all be like it was before. But some of the pieces are missing. And the rest are scattered all over the place. It’ll be centuries before we’re back where we were. If that’s even what we want.”
Jamie didn’t look at him as she asked the next question. “And where do you see yourself in all of that?”
He shrugged. “Here.” Her heart leaped, then steadied as he added, “For a little while. And then, we’ll see.”
We?
Finn was sitting back on his heels, surveying his work.
“Is it done?” she asked.
He frowned. “It doesn’t look like it did in my head.”
“It’s beautiful,” she said. “But you know the tide will come up.”
Finn nodded, apparently undisturbed. “I can make it again.”
“So what now?” Callan took another sip of his coffee.
Jamie gave him a sharp look. “I thought you just said . . .”
“Not that sort of what now. I just meant what are you going to do today?”
Jamie looked around. The sea was waiting, calm and cool beneath a clear sky. There were old paths to follow, beaches to comb. What would it be like to wake up every morning and ask that question? For every day to be something new, and not part of some pattern you were trying to weave with your life?
“I’ve still got Lowry’s things,” she said. “I should take them up there. I’ll have to go by boat. The tide’s on its way in.” She turned to Finn. “Do you want to come with me to see Lowry?”
Finn nodded.
“What about you?” Jamie asked Callan. “I could give you that sailing lesson.”
“Maybe later,” he said. “I went for a walk first thing. Found some old sailing books in the harbor office. Looks as though boats are a bit more complicated than I thought. Figured I’d spend a b
it of time learning the ropes.” He gave a brief smile. “Literally. If we start off with you trying to show me what’s what, I can pretty much guarantee we’ll be yelling at each other before we’re around the first headland. You go up to the island with Finn, and maybe I’ll be ready for a practical when you get back.”
It was a perfectly reasonable suggestion, but there was a part of her that was trying to shape it into a rejection. Or she could take it at face value and not write a whole alternative should be out of whatever it was that had hung between them last night.
“Okay,” she said lightly, and turned back toward the house.
CHAPTER
28
They took a motor launch that Jamie found tucked in between two of the larger sailing dinghies. When she checked the bio-oil tank, it was half full. More than enough for the trip there and back.
Finn sat quietly, trailing a hand over the side and snatching it back when a wave leaped up to catch at his fingers. Jamie kept them to a sedate pace, pointing out landmarks on the coastline and the great turbines mounted on man-made reefs a few hundred meters out beyond Lindisfarne.
They landed at an old wooden jetty, in the shallow inlet that formed a natural harbor. Ahead of them, the castle rose from its crag, solid and out of proportion to its setting, as though the long, low island must be right on the edge of upending and tipping into the sea. As she helped Finn out of the boat she cast a quick eye over the tide line, checking she’d left enough slack in the rope to allow for an hour or so of rise. She didn’t want to be much longer than that. Her stepmother had been adamant that she’d be fine on her own, but she was so slight, her skin so thin that Jamie could almost see the cancer tightening around her bones and vital organs.
They made their way through the odd little shanty town that edged the inlet. Beach huts, makeshift sheds made from old herring boats sawn in half and turned upside down, doors fitted awkwardly into the curved ends, and window boxes of now-dead flowers nailed beneath recycled dormers. They skirted a couple of derelict skiffs, perched upside down on a row of bow-legged trestles. She was sure they were the same ones that had been sitting here untouched for as long as she’d been coming here. Somewhere, someone had always been thinking Later, another day about them, until time had run out.
The island’s religious community was at the far end of the village. It had been set up a few years before Jamie left for Alegria. The small group of monks had slipped into island life quietly and unobtrusively. After a while people had fallen into the habit of talking as though they’d always been there.
As they turned into the narrow lane leading to the abbey, Lowry emerged from a flint-walled cottage. Jamie unslung his bag from her shoulders.
“We thought you might need your things.”
“Thank you.” He gave a little grimace. “I have to say, by the time we got here I was glad I wasn’t carrying that thing. Rena set a fairly ambitious pace.”
“Where is she?”
“Praying.” Lowry’s face was expressionless.
“Did you find the monks?”
Lowry nodded. “Two of them. There were five, but when the virus struck the island they apparently agreed that the other three would tend the sick for as long as they could, while the youngest two isolated themselves so that the community could have a hope of surviving.”
“That’s got to be hard to deal with,” Jamie said, trying to imagine how it would have felt to be on either side of that straw poll.
“They tell me they’ve spent a lot of time meditating and praying, and they’re at peace with it. They see their survival as a heavenly endorsement of the decision they all made.”
Jamie thought she could detect a hint of envy in his tone.
“Did anyone else on the island make it?”
“One,” Lowry said. “An old fisherman. He’d gone out on a long trip around the time the virus must have been transmitted to the island. There’s a pod of local dolphins that sometimes take themselves off for weeks at a time, and he was planning on following them to see where they went. He picked up some messages on his comm and stayed out at sea until his provisions ran out.”
“He never caught it?”
Lowry nodded. “He may well be the only one. The monks are sure it was God who saved him, but he seems to find that grimly amusing. He says the only god he’s ever believed in is the sea.”
Something occurred to Jamie, and she felt a little spike of fear-fueled adrenaline. “If he’s never had it, could he . . .”
“It’s okay.” Lowry cut across her. “Same thing occurred to Rena when she got here. Turns out she’s got a mobile lab kit in that bag of hers. She took samples and we’re all virus free, apparently. So it doesn’t stay in the blood. It’s gone for good.” His face darkened. “No antibodies, though. If it did somehow come back, we’d have no protection. It seems wrong, going through all that and not even being rewarded with immunity.”
“No immunity?” Jamie felt a breathless rush of fear. She suddenly wanted to back away from Lowry, even from Finn. “If it comes back . . .”
“It won’t,” Lowry said. “There’s nothing left of the dead but dust, and Rena says the virus couldn’t live in that.”
There was something unsettling about the thought of Rena crouching down, scooping the powdery remains of some unknown victim into one of her sterile test tubes.
“Why did she have a lab kit?” she asked.
“She picked it up on Alegria, apparently.”
Jamie couldn’t get a handle on the older woman. She was like one of those shape-shifters from mythology, slipping from your grasp just as you thought you’d figured her out. One minute she was rambling about God’s will; the next moment she was in efficient-lab-assistant mode, analyzing blood samples and collecting evidence. And for what purpose? The virus was gone. It wasn’t as though Rena was going to find a cure and bring back the dead. Jamie felt a flicker of anger. Mila had been shot, and they’d almost been caught, for something that couldn’t make any difference to anything.
“Are you staying for a while?” Lowry said, distracting her from her thoughts.
“For a little bit,” Jamie said. “Not too long.”
“Come and have a cup of tea.”
Lowry led them to a wood-framed building that Jamie thought might have been a shop the last time she was here. Inside, there were little clusters of wooden chairs and tables scattered about a high-ceilinged space, with a stainless-steel industrial kitchen behind a counter at the far end.
He went over to turn on the water boiler before finding mugs and tea bags. To Jamie’s surprise, instead of milk powder, he pulled a jug out of the fridge.
“Brother Xavier has figured out how to milk a cow,” Lowry said with a grin. “Not terribly efficiently, but it’s a start.”
“Maybe he can hold classes.”
“I think that’s exactly what he has in mind. They seem quietly sure they’re founding members of what’s going to be a growing community.”
“Why do they think people will come here?”
Lowry handed her a mug and held a second out to Finn, handle first. “The sea has always drawn people. There’s something about the coast. It’s an end, or a beginning.”
“So why did you come here?”
He shook his head. “There’s not a single answer to that.”
“So tell me the main reason.”
He swirled his tea around his mug. “Because it’s where Rena wanted to be.”
“You wanted to come here too.” Rena was standing in the doorway, wearing what looked like a makeshift monk’s robe, belted with a piece of stiff, fraying rope. When she shifted her weight the fabric sagged open, exposing her bony clavicle and the top of one shallow breast. Her hair straggled loose over her thin shoulders, and she looked shriveled and reduced, her unhealthy sheen reminding Jamie, with a stab of acute discomfort, of her st
epmother.
“I did,” Lowry said. “But if you’d wanted to go somewhere else, I’d have made sure you got there.”
“You always look after me.” The words should have been tender, but there was no softening of Rena’s expression. “But it’s all right now. I’m going to set you free. Soon you won’t have to worry about me.”
As she turned away, she collided with a man on his way in. He was no more than thirty, also robed, but his garb was neat and clean, and there was a discreet silver cross at his neck. He turned to Lowry, his brow creasing in concern.
“Still just the same,” Lowry said. “I’ll try to talk to her later. I thought she might settle down after she got here.”
“Give her time.” The young monk’s voice was deep and resonant, with a clear line of serenity running through it. “It will take a while for the dust and grime of the world to wear away.”
“Perhaps,” Lowry said. “Brother Dominic, Jamie and Finn. Jamie is Laura’s stepdaughter.”
“How is Laura?” the monk asked.
“Not great,” Jamie said. “Thank you for keeping an eye on her.”
“We wanted to bring her here,” Brother Dominic said. “But she didn’t want to leave her home.” He smiled. “Now I know what she was waiting for. Faith is a wonderful thing.”
Jamie felt a prickle of resentment. It wasn’t God that had brought her here. It was a rambling line of mistakes and slow-forming desires, and a man who’d snapped his own life in two to give her what she’d told him she wanted.
“I have some things for you to take back,” the monk went on. “Some vegetables, and I think we might find some eggs.” He glanced at Finn. “Perhaps this young man would like to come help me look?”
Finn glanced at Jamie.
“It’s okay,” she said.
Finn nodded and followed the monk out of the refectory.
When they’d gone, Jamie turned to Lowry. “Rena’s getting worse, isn’t she?”
Lowry nodded. “I don’t know how to help her.”
“What happened? Between the two of you, I mean.”