‘Lizzie? Are you there?’ He was squinting towards her, one hand to his eyes as he peered in her direction. ‘Come aboard. Take it carefully, there are ropes you have to look out for.’
She stepped from the wall onto the deck. He took her hand again. The boat sighed under their weight.
‘Welcome to the Ozymandias,’ he whispered. They stood still while the deck settled beneath them.
‘ “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,” ’ he intoned. ‘ “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” You’ll get a good look at her tomorrow. The poem’s by Shelley, fairly appropriate if you don’t mind a masculine name for a boat. The poem goes on: “Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare the lone and level sands stretch far away.” In the morning you’ll see what a wreck the Ozymandias is, and you’ll see the lone and level sands when the tide goes out. Watch your head now, as we go below.’
He led her down the steep, narrow steps into the cabin. The amber light from the paraffin lamp gave an illusion of warmth, after the cold blackness of the night. Lizzie stared around for a moment, then she gave a squeal of excitement and bounced onto the bed, sitting next to Harry. They’d come into a good-sized cabin, bigger than Lizzie’s room in her hall of residence in London, except that the ceiling was no more than seven feet high. The walls were panelled with wood, from which Harry had scraped away some of the paint in one of his earlier attempts at restoration. The floor was bare boards. There were round windows at eye level, portholes without curtains. Most of the paint had been stripped from the ceiling too; overhead, there was a hatch, bolted shut. Opposite the rumpled double bed, there was a stove, black and pot-bellied, with hinged doors on the front, with room on top for a saucepan or a kettle but not both, and a black chimney which disappeared through the ceiling above it; on the floor beside the stove, there were some splinters of driftwood and some newspapers. At the forward end of the cabin, a low door opened into a tiny compartment in the bow of the boat.
Lizzie squirmed with delight, flicking her hair from side to side as she pointed her bright white face from corner to corner of the cabin. In spite of the bareness, the absence of anything homely or decorative, the cabin of the Ozymandias was clearly wonderful to her. The lamp made everything golden, even the dust and the cobwebs, the nakedness of the boards and the stubbornness of the yellowing paint. When the timbers groaned beneath her, when the boat sighed from end to end and scrubbed itself on the sea wall, she jumped up with a shout of laughter.
‘Oh, Harry, this is marvellous!’ she cried, her face radiant in the lamplight. ‘We could make this really lovely, couldn’t we? Let’s get the fire lit! Shall I?’
Kneeling, without taking her jacket off or slinging away her shoulder bag, she screwed up the sheets of newspaper, pushed them into the stove and built a flimsy structure of twigs which exploded into flames as soon as she applied a match. Harry watched her, happy to see that she’d forgotten her sadness, for the time being at least. She was a tiny figure, slight and frail in a dark-blue fleece jacket, blue jeans and suede boots. Her mass of hair gleamed like copper in the firelight. Although she was of age now, she was still the little sister she’d always been, whom he’d loved and cherished so much. He watched as she added more and bigger pieces of wood, as the fire grew hotter and stronger.
‘There! That’s enough for tonight, to take the chill off!’ she cried. ‘We can collect lots more wood from the beach tomorrow, can’t we?’
She turned towards him, her face flushed by the heat of the flames and with the pleasure of making them. The flames were blue, because of the salt in the driftwood. The fire threw red and golden shadows on the walls of the cabin.
The boat moved gently on the falling tide, as Harry and Lizzie Clewe, tired after their journey and drained by the grief of their bereavement, snuggled in blankets for their first night together on board the Ozymandias.
Chapter Three
When Harry awoke, there was a pale light in the cabin. It was a light he recognized, reflected from the sand and shingle around the boat, which told him that the tide was out. Apart from the channels of the river itself, the estuary was dry. He lay on his back and watched as the shadows retreated to their corners of the ceiling, where they would be trapped in the cobwebs until the fire was lit again. He sat up and rubbed his eyes, groping for his glasses on the floor beside the bed.
Lizzie wasn’t there, although the place beside him was still warm and her bag was on a chair at the foot of the bed. Harry got up, still wearing the clothes he’d been wearing the night before, put on his shoes and climbed to the deck.
At first he couldn’t see her. It was six o’clock on a grey, October morning. Shivering, he scanned the foreshore with his binoculars, across the sands to the creek where the river ran into the sea, to the tough grass of the dunes on the further side of the estuary. This time, for once, he ignored the gathering birds: he was worried that Lizzie was missing, so far from her home, so far from her studies, in such a remote, unfamiliar place. He wished, for a second, that he hadn’t invited her with him: not for himself, but for her. With a shudder of anxiety, he realised that, as her older brother, thirteen years her senior and her only relation in all the world now that their parents were gone, he was responsible for her. Perhaps, instead of bringing her to Wales, he should have accompanied her to London and resettled her there, where she might purge her grief by immersing herself in her music.
But then there was a cry from the estuary. He saw Lizzie, a hundred yards from the boat, coming towards him on the foreshore. Her coppery hair was the brightest thing in the monochrome morning. She was waving to him and calling. He looked at her through the binoculars: she was smiling too. She approached slowly, for she was walking on the very edge of the foreshore, on the uneven footing of boulders and seaweed, through the flotsam and jetsam of timbers and bottles and bones and bundled grasses. Every now and then, balancing precariously on the slippery rocks, she squatted and turned over the tangles of wrack, examined a relic and discarded it, before straightening up and continuing towards the boat. Harry watched her, cursing the poor condition of the binoculars. He put them down and waited for her to arrive at the mooring.
Her footsteps rang on the rusted rungs of the ladder as she climbed from the shore to the top of the sea wall. Breathing hard, she crossed the deck to where Harry was sitting. He didn’t turn to look at her when she paused behind him; she said nothing, because she was out of breath, but he felt her hand on his head. Her fingers, smelling of seaweed, cold and wet from the beach and the cold, wet ladder, ran over his ear and down his cheek to his mouth, where they traced the line of his lips.
‘Look what I found, Harry, among all the other wonderful things on your wonderful beach!’ she whispered, leaning her head close to his. ‘What on earth is it? Is it a sea spider? Is there such a thing? Or only in the weird and wonderful world of Harry Clewe? Look, Harry! What is it?’
They took the brittlestar into the cabin and placed it in a shallow tray of water, with a bed of sand. Lizzie lit the fire. Straight away, that first morning, she began to make the Ozymandias more like home.
Chapter Four
For a start, Harry and Lizzie tramped the shoreline many times, from the Ozymandias to the mouth of the estuary and back again. The priority was fresh water. They took a bucket to the brook, filled it and manhandled it, laughing and shouting as they stumbled over rocks and weed and up the iron ladder, so that Harry could deal with the chemical toilet in the forward cabin. Then they washed, shyly, negotiating the space around one another, giggling, not saying much.
The high-water line was littered with driftwood, and they came and went with armfuls of it, spars and branches which were white with salt, bleached by the sun, dried to brittleness and ready for burning. As they walked, Lizzie enquired about everything she found and saw, because everything was new to her. She was fascinated by the washed-up jellyfish, some of them a yard across, translucent and slick like gobbets of melted plastic. T
here were turnstones, very tame, very businesslike, working the weed for the insects in it. Harry showed her the mergansers, proud of them and pleased that they were there, and he hoped that Lizzie might see the peregrine he’d seen before, which terrorised the starlings from the cowpats in the fields and dashed among them, dangling a yellow claw. She picked up shells: winkles, whelks and wentletraps, cockles, razors and piddocks. She knelt and rummaged in the mattress of sea lettuce, bootlace and bladder-wrack, the great clumps of eel grass like heads of human hair. She found bones, the skulls of birds and sheep; the foot of a swan, the wings of a tern, the long, thin, down-curving bill of a curlew. A rubber glove, protruding from the mud, made her squeal. There were no more brittlestars, only the one she’d found that dawn and brought back to the boat as a trophy.
Hungry and dirty but very happy, they walked along the seashore to Caernarfon. Now they could see the way that had been so black the night before. Across the strait, Anglesey was easy and green; inland, the mountains of Snowdonia rose bare, a fortress of wet, grey slabs. The castle was ochre in the winter sunlight, many-faceted like a nugget of gold. Harry held his sister’s hand, and he could feel through the touch of her fingers the thrill of excitement she was experiencing.
They separated for fifteen minutes at the town’s swimming pool, meeting again after their showers, and from there they went shopping for essential supplies for the Ozymandias. By mid-afternoon, on a day that nipped around the nostrils and set their faces tingling, it was time to step out fast, back towards the boat. The tide was rising in the estuary, driving the feeding birds closer and closer together on the exposed sandbanks. The air grew colder, so that Harry hesitated at first, when Lizzie asked if they could pause to look at the little church in the fields just a hundred yards from the shore. But then he led her towards it, among the slow-eyed cattle.
The church of St Baglan squatted against the prevailing wind, rooted into the earth. Surrounding it, protecting it from the weather and the livestock, was a dry-stone wall, splashed with white, orange and scarlet lichen; and there were sycamores, stripped of their foliage, warped by the gales. Harry led Lizzie through the lych gate and into the churchyard. The wind had got up. The jackdaws brawled from the trees and were tossed like rags across the fields.
Lizzie moved from grave to grave, apparently careless of the cold. She bent to the stones, pushed aside the long grass and the brambles to read the inscriptions: the epitaphs of sailors and tide surveyors, shoemakers and candlemakers, schoolmasters and sea captains, of their wives and children. She called out to Harry, to kneel at the family grave of one John Hughes, his wife Laura and their six children, and she read the names aloud, her voice trembling.
‘Look, Harry! Laura, Ellen, John, John, John and Robert . . . They had six children and not one of them survived two years! Here’s another one the same,’ she said, turning to the next stone. ‘Ann Ellen, Catherine Ellen, Robert Griffith, Robert David, Jane Ellen, Gwen Ellen . . . six more children in the same grave! The children of R and J Williams of Cefn Ynysoedd, Llanfaglan, and none of them reaching the age of two! How awful! What on earth happened to them, Harry?’
By now, her thin white face was pinched with cold and her eyes were watering.
‘Well, look at the dates,’ he answered, kneeling beside her and hugging her close to him. ‘They’re not really so old, Lizzie, considering that the church dates from the twelfth century. In fact, if we come back some time when it’s unlocked, I can show you the lintel over the doorway which has been dated to the sixth century, just after the end of the Roman occupation. But these children were dying in the diphtheria epidemics in the middle of the last century. If one of them got it, they all got it. There was a very high infant mortality rate in those days, with or without epidemics.’
He could feel her shivering now. ‘Look, Lizzie,’ he said, ‘if we don’t get you inside quickly, you’ll catch your death. Then I might as well leave you here in the cemetery, with the little bones of the Williams children . . .’
She shuddered, grimacing with laughter at the horror and the humour to be found in the leaning, lichen-encrusted headstones.
‘We’ll come back another time,’ he told her. ‘You can spend as long as you like here.’
He led her around the church, trailing his fingertips on its flanks as though it were an old horse, and they walked to the seashore track.
There was an early, threatening dusk by the time they approached the Ozymandias. The sky was prematurely dark, darkening with an ugly bruise. The sea crept over the mudflats. The masses of weed, half submerged in the shallows, black in the twilight, were like corpses, the nibbled and bloated bodies of drowned men which had been washed into the estuary. The swans fed among them, with growls and croaks. Over the open fields, a barn owl was hunting, quartering like a pale moth, dropping to the long grass to gorge on beetles, to linger in the hot, sweet breath of the cattle. It wafted to the hedgerow, where it stared its terrible moon-face and felt for flesh with its talons. All traces of the sun were gone.
Arriving at the boat, Harry stepped down first onto the deck, which was a yard or more below the level of the sea wall, and he helped Lizzie on board. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘We’re just in time. Let’s not go below just yet. Let’s wait for a minute.’
Gazing into the darkness, they heard the whispering of the wind in the dunes, the rumble of surf in the open sea, and the comforting conversation of a thousand ducks. At this further corner of the estuary, there were no lights from cottages or farms: only a towering sky, a gathering twilight, a man and a woman on the deck of their boat. They waited together. The boat groaned. They felt it stir.
‘Now!’ Harry whispered, ducking his face to the girl’s. He squeezed her to him. ‘Now, Lizzie! This is it! Can you feel it? The Ozymandias is waking up again!’
At that moment, the tide, which had been stroking the hull of the boat, lifted it gently from the sand. The boat shivered from one end to the other, seemed to stretch itself like an old dog, and then there was a wonderful feeling of weightlessness. The Ozymandias was afloat once more. Harry and Lizzie were no longer earthbound. They were sailing through an infinite darkness, following a ballooning moon to the very edges of the world.
Chapter Five
That evening and that night, in the lamplit, firelit cabin, they continued their voyage, further and further from the day which had brought them suddenly together again. There was no talk of their parents, although they were thinking about them. There was no talk of Lizzie’s music, her cello, her studies; no talk of London or Shrewsbury, which were faraway places in a distant, foreign, dimly remembered country. The wind got up. The moon was muffled by cloud. At sea, there was a storm which drove a swell into the shelter of the estuary. There was nothing to be seen from the portholes, for the blackness of the sky and the ocean was a kind of blindness.
The stove grew hot on a feast of firewood. The fuel, spitting salt, burned bright-blue flames, and soon the cabin was warm. Harry and Lizzie ate soup and bread and cheese, drank coffee laced with whisky. As the storm became fiercer, they blew out the lamp and lay on the bed, covering themselves with blankets. The Ozymandias wrestled at its mooring ropes, groaning and cracking, the timbers flexing like muscles unaccustomed to the work. It rode the tide. In the firelight, Harry and Lizzie listened to the wild wind and the booming water, imagining the world outside tossed into mad, blind, turbulent motion.
Rougher and rougher . . . they held each other tightly as the cabin rolled, as the boat banged on the sea wall, as the ropes stretched and sang. Noisier and noisier . . . they gripped hard, their faces deep in one another’s hair. When the fire died and neither of them moved to revive it, the cabin was also black. So they lay together that night, huddled in the roaring, pitching darkness, as though they were the only living things in the grip of the storm.
Lizzie woke Harry with a whisper the following morning. The wind had dropped. The boat stirred fitfully with the chop of the waves, but the s
torm was over. It had turned to rain, whose watery grey light filled the cabin. Lizzie, sitting on the edge of the bed with the tray of shallow water beside her, was whispering over and over, using the word like a charm to wake her brother – ‘brittlestar, brittlestar, brittlestar’ – and stirring the sand so that the strange, antique creature squirmed around her fingers. She grinned down at him, her face brilliant, her hair like a flame, as he sat up and peered shortsightedly to see what she was doing.
‘The brittlestar!’ she said. ‘It’s our lucky charm, Harry! It guided us through the storm, when there were no other stars to guide us.’
He turned sleepily towards her, blinked into the tray and then buried his face in the blankets again. ‘We stay in bed on days like this,’ he mumbled. ‘We stay in bed all day . . .’
So they did. The rain continued its gentle drumming on the roof of the cabin. The Ozymandias nestled to the sea wall as the breeze died to nothing. By midday, after Harry had got up to rekindle the fire – not a difficult task with plenty of dry wood and the ashes still warm from the night before – as he and Lizzie leaned together under the weight of the bedding, they felt the hull of the boat settling on its cushion of mud. Then there was stillness, a returning to earth. When Lizzie got up to look from the windows, she reported a landscape of flat, grey sand, a grey horizon and a huge, grey sky, a population of scurrying grey birds whose names she couldn’t remember . . . and rain, a soft, unrelenting rain which gave everything a curious light, the grey-white glimmer of pearl.
The Blood of Angels Page 13