Moon Island

by Rosie Thomas

  The footsteps passed into Doone’s bedroom and the light swept away with them.

  At the back of the house where May lay huddled the sound of the sea was muffled. The tiny noises that reached her from across the hallway were much louder. She heard a soft swish like clothing brushing against furniture and the bump of small objects being moved around. That these sounds were audible and yet inexplicable made fear tighten its tourniquet grip on her. She was locked into immobility, but she could feel the bubbles of a scream or a sob forcing their way up into her throat. She closed her eyes tighter and bit the inside of her mouth to contain it.

  Suddenly there was a snap. A second later the steps were coming back again, much louder and firmer.

  It would find her now, whatever it was.

  She hunched and waited. But the steps passed her father’s door and trod down the stairs. They went across the living-room beneath, then she couldn’t hear them any more, nor anything else except the endless voice of the sea.

  She had no idea how long she lay in the same position. It was a long time, because when she did try to move hot wires of pain shot through her joints. She dared to push back the blanket and lifted her head to look around. There was nothing, except the darkened room.

  After some more long minutes she found the courage to roll sideways and put her feet to the floor. They were numb with cold and cramp in her legs almost made her stumble. May crept across to Doone’s bedroom and with a brave sweep of her hand she clicked on the light. The brightness of it burned her eyes, but even so she saw at once that the diary was missing from its place.

  A cold hand touched the back of her neck. She spun round, gasping, but there was nothing there.

  From the window May saw that there were lights still moving on Moon Island. She could run out of this house with its echoes and footfalls, and simply row across to find the others. Kevin and Joel, mumbling about how stoned they were. Gail, and Lucas and Ivy. The moment she thought of it she was overcome by a longing to get to Ivy. Bold, sarcastic Ivy would pinch out this fear for her like an ant between her silver fingernails. To go to Ivy, that was what she must do.

  She ran down the stairs, her breath snicking in her chest. The room was empty, just as she had left it, the television remote dropped on the counter. She threw open the porch door and ran across the strip of garden to the beach steps. Across the shingle she ran faster, even though the stones hurt her bare feet. A rowing dinghy, one of the Beams’ that they used to reach the sailboat at high water, was moored to a little white buoy. The oars were revealed neatly shipped inside when she tore back the tarpaulin cover.

  May undid the mooring line and at a run pushed the dinghy away from the beach. She threw herself over the side and fell into the bottom. She was soaked to the waist, but hardly even noticed it. Her sister, she must get to her sister. A mixture of love and anticipatory relief made her sob, and there were tears on her cheeks as she fitted the lightweight oars and began to row. The boat skimmed over the flat water. The moon was up and the wake lapped behind the transom like molten pewter.

  May looked back over her shoulder only once to check her progress towards the island. Then the prow of the boat ran into the beach with a soft judder and she let her head fall forward for one second in relief. Sweat from the effort of rowing so hard almost blinded her. She stumbled out of the boat and made the motion of pulling it further up into the sand. She realised then that there were no other boats beached anywhere along the glimmering crescent. The houses across on the bluff looked dark and gaunt. May had no idea what time it was.

  On the beach she found the ashes of the bonfire. There were no embers left glowing at the heart of it but when she knelt down to touch it she felt the residue of heat. Glancing up from where she knelt she saw the lights again. They had receded into the trees. There was a pale glow, which wavered between the black boles of the spruces. ‘Ivy?’ she called out.

  Her voice sounded weak and flat, and the salt-heavy air damped it into nothing. The tiny ripples breaking a yard away made an endless whisper. ‘Ivy?’

  There was no answer. May thought suddenly of Doone’s sailboat gliding over the bay and the green skin of water closing over her body. The sea at her back seemed to pull at her, enticing her back to its innocent lacy edge and into the chilly beaten-silver oblivion beyond. Her soaking clothes were clammy against her legs.

  May began to run. She pounded up the slope of sand away from the sea and over the lip of earth, where vegetation matted the margins of the beach. She stumbled across roots and brambles until she reached the black canopy of trees, then threw herself in among them. The light above and ahead tantalised her; it was further away, growing fainter. ‘Ivy,’ she screamed. ‘Wait for me.’

  All around her was the shiver and rustle of woodland. She began to run again, clawing her way up the slope. Once the ground seemed to give way beneath her and she looked down into the hollow where she had once seen Lucas and Ivy together. She remembered the pallor of Ivy’s skin.

  She was crying and gasping for breath as she scrambled on upwards. She had all but forgotten that there was no reason for her climb; all she could think of was setting a distance between herself and the cold beckoning of the sea. Ivy must be here somewhere. She had to reach her.

  After another hundred yards, with her lungs threatening to burst inside her, May realised that she was plunging downhill. She must have crested the spine of the island and now she was running out of control towards the open sea. She crashed to a stop and looked around wildly, her breath as loud as tidal surges in her ears.

  Over her head a huge oak tree spread its branches like veins against the sky. They seemed to toss with the wind, although it was a still night. May put her hands up to her hair and found it wet. Slick strands of it clung to her skull and her neck, and there was salt in her mouth and on her tongue.

  She took one step backwards and another, away from the great tree. The melancholy and doom that hung about it reached out to clutch at her, as strong as gripping hands. Weakly she staggered another few yards. Ivy wasn’t here; she couldn’t be anywhere near this place.

  There was a darker mass ahead of her, more solid than the woven trees and branches. A sweet-sharp smell of crushed juniper caught in her nostrils and wrist-thick tree roots caught her foot. The island was alive with footsteps, with the swish of bodies steadily advancing on her through the foliage. She froze into stillness, knowing that there was nowhere to run, her ears filling with the pin-sharp signals of threat as they closed in on her.

  Her innards loosened as she shrank backwards, one step.

  It was a fine house that he had built for himself, she saw that immediately she began the walk towards it over the headland. Robert Hanner had always liked the best and it had never been his habit to forgo what he wanted or imagined to be his due.

  The house was positioned on a vantage point that gave a commanding view of the serene bay and its islands, but it was set somewhat at an angle so that the occupants might not always have to gaze directly at the restless waves. After the months she had spent aboard the Dolphin, more than three years ago now but still present in her mind and in her dreams, Sarah fully understood the reasons why Robert might not always wish to have the sea before his eyes.

  There was a grey curl of smoke rising from one of the chimneys. As Sarah drew slowly closer the sturdy clapboard walls and the secure shingle of the roof told her this was a safe haven for the people within. There were dainty lace curtains looped at the lower windows and a tidy pile of split logs was stored under a lean-to at the side.

  After her long search and the journey that had led her here she was in no great hurry nor, knowing what she now knew, was there any longer the pounding of hope and anticipation in her heart. Instead there was a bitter determination to finish the course she had begun and to have done with it at last. She slipped a hand into the deep pocket at her side and closed her fingers around the smooth handle of the knife. She had carried the weapon about with her for so long t
hat it felt like her trusted companion, the only certain ally she could claim in the world.

  When she reached the shelter of a clump of bushes Sarah sank down on a rock so that she was hidden from the windows of the house. She rested for a moment, drawing her loose coat around her, although the fading afternoon had not yet turned cool.

  It seemed that Robert had chosen one of the sweetest spots imaginable to make his own. As it sank between bars of cloud the sun glittered on the sea and silvered the lines of breakers. The island in the bay’s shelter was a handsome crescent of rock and sand crowned with a proud ridge of dark pointed firs, and on this distant beach another fringe of smaller waves was breaking. The light was as clear as spring water, and the air was fresh with salt and the scent of thyme and juniper.

  ‘The Captain’s House,’ the woman at the lodging house in Pittsharbor had called it, although Sarah knew well enough that Robert Hanner was no retired sea-captain. Wherever and from whom his money had been stolen or extorted, it was not aboard a whaling ship, neither in the captain’s cabin nor the forecastle. Robert had completed only one thirteen-month voyage aboard the whaler out of Nantucket before signing himself off. Once she herself had made the long voyage home from South America, Sarah’s investigations at the shipping agents had revealed that much, if little else, about her one-time lover who was now her quarry.

  After that there had been a long, weary time, which had yielded no information as to his whereabouts, and Sarah had come to understand that her task was beyond daunting. Robert Hanner had simply left Nantucket and vanished into the great continent of America, taking his name and his history, and Sarah Corder’s life and hopes with him.

  Once the small notoriety surrounding the return of the young woman who had disguised herself as a sailor had died down, Sarah devoted herself to becoming invisible. It was not a difficult achievement. While her little store of money lasted she travelled the Massachusetts seaboard, staying wherever she could find a cheap bed, then moving on and always searching. Robert was a New Englander. Her belief and most fervent hope was that after all he would not have strayed too far from the familiar horizons of home. She scanned every face she passed in every street, eavesdropped on every conversation she could approach, read all the columns in each local newspaper. There was never any trace of him.

  When her money was used up Sarah found employment as a scullery maid in the house of a Boston merchant. She slept in a curtained cubbyhole off the cavernous basement kitchen, and nursed her implacable resolve through the hard and monotonous days like a tender mother with a baby. Her meagre wages and few lonely hours off were all spent in searching the nameless crowds for Robert. When Boston yielded nothing of him she moved again, with a reference grudgingly supplied by the mistress of the house, to Portland and after a few months more to Rockport on Penobscot Bay. She allowed her instincts to guide her because she had no other inspiration. The daily sight of the sea was a reminder of what she had suffered aboard the Dolphin and served to firm her intentions, if any such reinforcement were necessary. Sarah had become a grim and melancholy version of the lost young woman to whom Matthias Plant had been drawn so tenderly.

  At Rockport she found Robert Hanner. Or rather she stumbled across his name and whereabouts.

  One evening, after she had completed her work, she was sitting beside the kitchen range with her weekly diet of the local newspapers. The light was dim and she hunched forward in her chair, turning the smudged columns of newsprint, frowning in concentration as she read. Turning to the Announcements section of the Advertiser of Eastern Maine the name she had sought for so long suddenly leapt out at her.

  At Pittsharbor on 22 July,

  to Robert and Charlotte Hanner,

  the gift of a healthy daughter.

  Sarah let the paper fall into her lap and stared at the fire within its iron cage. She saw her handsome lover in the red heart of it as clearly as on the day he had abandoned her. Robert had not even changed his name, so he did not believe he had anything to fear. There would be no forcing him to marry her; he was already married and a father.

  The fire crimsoned one side of Sarah’s impassive face. The other cheek was as pale and cold as marble.

  Within two days she had left the Rockport house and begun the journey north-eastwards to the fishing village of Pittsharbor. Part of the way she travelled with a local carrier who was transporting ironmongery for delivery to general storekeepers along the route. There were certain favours he required of her in return and these Sarah performed mechanically, as if her mind and heart were entirely disconnected from her body. The last fifteen miles she walked.

  Two miles short of her destination she came to a rough inn and lodging house frequented by carriers and drovers, and the salesmen who brought commodities of all kinds to the remote communities of the area. Caring nothing for the speculative glances and bold invitations of her fellow guests, she took a room for the night and stayed within it until the middle of the following afternoon. If any one of the other travellers had been able to look in on her they would have seen her sitting motionless on the frowsy bed, hour after hour, her head bent in thought.

  In the afternoon of the next day she emerged.

  She called on the innkeeper’s wife for some bread and cheese, and ate a little of the food when it was brought to her. She also drank a glass of rum and water. The woman of the house was a coarse creature who showed a ready tendency to talk once Sarah had explained that she was searching for a distant relative of hers. As a Christian gentleman, Sarah whispered, he might be willing to help her in some trouble that had befallen her.

  The woman knowingly pursed her lips. ‘And what might this gentleman’s name be?’

  Sarah uttered it.

  ‘Why, yes. Captain Hanner, indeed. There ain’t a better man in Pittsharbor, I believe, although I don’t know him personal. Came up here two years ago, he did, from somewhere west. Married Charlotte Day within six month and built her a house on the bluff, out the other side of the harbour. Folk say he has a right nice little business started up, bringing ladies’ dress lengths and bits of finery up from Boston to please those as have the money for such stuff. I wouldn’t know a thing about that. Seems a strange manner o’work for a sea captain, although his wife’s father is a draper with a good old store over in Belfast. But there, you’ll know all this since he’s a relation o’yours.’

  The woman studied her, hard-eyed and appraising.

  ‘How might I find the house?’ Sarah asked softly.

  ‘You take the Pittsharbor road and follow it on past the town and the harbour. You’ll see the headland and the place he’s built out there. Can’t miss it, if you keep within sight of the sea.’

  Sarah paid for her food and lodging, and picked up the small carpet-bag containing her few belongings. She slipped her hand once into her deep pocket, making sure her ally was still at her side, then set out along the Pittsharbor road.

  Once on the headland within sight of Robert Hanner’s house, Sarah waited impassively behind her screen of bushes until darkness fell. It was late September and the threat of ice already shivered the air. She saw the lamps lit in the windows of the house and stepped out of her shelter, leaving her carpet-bag behind her. She made her way silent-footed between the boxberry plants until she came close up to the house. Then, shadow-like, she melted into the deeper shadows beside the head-high pile of logs that had been providently stacked against the winter. She put her hand into her pocket and took out the long-bladed knife. The steel blinked its cold eye at her as she waited.

  It was a weary interval before she heard the catch of the door undone and the creak of hinges. Sarah hefted the knife in her hand. She knew the weight and thrust of it too well from the work of stripping blubber off the stinking carcasses of whales.

  Robert Hanner came out to the log-pile.

  He was in his shirt-sleeves and with him came the scent of good food cooking and the warmth of a fireside. He bent to gather up the wood.

 
Sarah knew where to drive in the blade. She must guide it between the ribs and up, up into the tissue of the lung. Her arm, her whole body twitched violently with the anticipated thrust, but she could not make it come. Instead, she saw the body of poor Martin the bowman. He lay in the bottom of the whaleboat, his clothing ripped from him and his chest tom open by the line. She saw the bluish-white splintered ruin of his rib-cage and the crimson pulp within that pulsed with the dying rhythm of his heart. It was an image that still visited her dreams. At the same time she heard the steady voice of good Matthias Plant. His fatherly kindness was a long time ago, but it was almost the last she had known.

  The hand that held the knife hung paralysed at her side.

  Robert Hanner gathered up the logs and all unknowing turned back to his family fireside.

  She left the Captain’s House and the headland, and carried her bag down to the silent harbour.

  Moored to one of the jetty posts she found a dory and a stout pair of oars stowed within it. Her one thought was to remove herself, to retreat like a nocturnal animal beyond the reach of light and humanity. She unhitched the boat and bent to the oars. After the weight and speed of the whaleboat the little craft seemed no more substantial than an eggshell as she drove it through the swell.

  Sarah rowed herself across the bay and out where the current ran between the island and the rocky promontory that jutted from the headland. Pittsharbor town nestled safely in its hollow, as far out of her reach as the moon.

  Her first thought had been to row on to the horizon, until either weariness or the waves extinguished her. But some small flame of self-preservation still burned in Sarah, and the flicker of it made her turn her practised oar so that the dory drew broadside to the island and the shoreline that faced the open sea. She paddled through the surf and the prow of the boat grated on the shingle. With strength that she did not know she possessed she hauled it up out of reach of the greedy tide.