by Kayte Nunn
“Oh yes, there they are.” Like sudden sunlight on an overcast day, the flash of her smile, her face briefly lighting up, transformed her. Warmed him too, if he was honest.
“Come on, it’s nearly low tide. Let’s go down and see if we can find some clams. Mrs. Biggs makes a rather good soup from them.”
She followed him toward the beach, hearing the hiss of the waves as they struck the shore, and watched as he dug in with the shovel. He sifted through the upturned sand until several long, thin shells were revealed. “Razor clams. Absolutely delicious, I guarantee it,” he said with satisfaction. “Grab them for me, before they bury themselves again. Here—” He handed her the bucket he’d brought.
Esther removed her gloves, stuffing them in her coat pocket and gingerly picked up one of the shells, brushing off the sand and holding it high to examine it. “Are you sure we can eat them?” She wrinkled her nose.
“Well, we’re not doing this for the hell of it.”
Chapter Sixteen
Isles of Scilly, Spring 2018
As Rachel piloted the small boat out into the open water, she could see that the storm brewing on the horizon was moving faster than she had anticipated. It would almost certainly be upon her before she could make it back to St. Mary’s and safety. She glanced backward. Tresco was behind her now, not worth heading back to. As she read the shapes of the islands on the starboard side, expecting to see Samson and the gray-brown buildings of Hugh Town, she had to check twice. They didn’t look like the islands she had been expecting to see at all. Unless she was mistaken, these were Great, Little, and Middle Arthur.
A sickening feeling took hold in the pit of her stomach. She must have taken a wrong turn when she left Tresco. There was no time to go back now. The visibility was closing in fast and the wind, which had picked up, began to lash at the small boat, making it rock from side to side. She looked around again. The storm bore down, almost upon her now, and she felt the first fat drops of rain splash on her face and ping off the metal boat. It was as dark as an eerie twilight. A jagged bolt of lightning split the sky and then, only seconds later, an almighty boom of thunder, as if a bomb had been dropped.
Rachel had seen her fair share of dramatic tropical storms while living in the Pacific, and as a result had developed a healthy respect for their damaging power. She certainly didn’t like being out on the water in a small boat in such a storm with nowhere to hide from the lightning, but she forced herself to remain calm. She steered onward, trying not to panic and over-rev the engine. Going too fast in such conditions would be a mistake: the chop was heavy and she didn’t want to take on any water and risk having to stop and bale out.
She remembered the old house on Little Embers and, despite Jonah’s words about the hermit who lived there, calculated that it was her best hope of shelter. Just able to make it out on the horizon, she opened the throttle, riding the knife edge between speed and control in order to get there as quickly as possible.
There was another almighty crack and Rachel reflexively ducked, even though it would make no difference if the lightning did decide to strike her. Water slapped over the side of the little dinghy and the bow wave came dangerously high but she continued, urging the motor on.
The shoreline of Little Embers came into view just as the outboard sputtered, lost power, and then cut out completely. The boat wallowed in the sudden lull and Rachel nearly overbalanced. She steadied herself and pulled the starter cord, trying to spark it back into life. She pulled it again, and again, but it stubbornly refused to restart. It was dead. She let forth a torrent of expletives and slammed her hand against the plastic casing. She was screwed.
Marooned.
Drifting fast away from the land.
The rain had begun to pelt down now and within a few minutes a puddle formed at her feet. The words “sitting duck” echoed in her head. One thing was certain, there was no point in remaining at the stern of the boat doing nothing to help herself.
She took her camera from around her neck, unclipped the straps of her waders and pulled them down to her waist, then, lying as flat as she could, wriggled out of them, removing her jeans at the same time. She stripped off her sweater and T-shirt for good measure: they would only weigh her down. She’d been caught out once before in a storm on Pittwater and she was a good swimmer, so she wasn’t ready to panic, not yet. But the water in the Scilly Isles was considerably colder and she risked hypothermia unless the currents were kind to her.
Wearing just her bra and knickers and soaked through from the rain, she calculated that there were about five hundred meters between her and the shoreline. No big deal on a calm day in warm water, but a different story in the middle of a torrential downpour with limited visibility.
As if to urge her over the edge, a forked bolt of lightning lit up the sky, the thunder rolling in milliseconds behind it. The storm was almost overhead.
She crawled forward to the front of the boat and grasped the line attached to the bow, tying it over one shoulder and across her body. Her plan, sketchy as it was, was to swim the boat into the shore.
She stood up in the rocking boat and before she could change her mind, leaped overboard.
Jesus. It was freezing. The icy water forced the air out of her lungs and her brain felt as if a tight metal band was cinched around it. Gasping as she came to the surface, she found a sightline on the island—a clump of trees that she could just see through the gloom—and struck out for them.
It was harder than she had imagined to tow the boat behind her, and when she looked up again after a few minutes of swimming, she didn’t appear to have made any progress at all. Flipping onto her back, she began to kick, giving her arms a rest. As she did so, a wave washed over her and she swallowed a mouthful of seawater. Not such a good idea. Coughing and spluttering, she turned back on her front and began to swim again, counting her strokes in lots of fifty to keep herself going.
She felt as if she’d been at it for hours, but it was probably only minutes. Her arms were burning from the effort of swimming, the muscles working hard against the tide. She had lost all feeling in her fingers and toes and she had to clamp her lips together in order to stop her teeth from chattering and swallowing more water.
A choppy wave broke over her and she ducked, holding her breath until she deemed it safe to surface again. Feeling considerably lighter in its aftermath, she realized that the line attaching her to the boat had come loose. Soleil was now drifting away from her at a fast rate of knots.
Perhaps jumping out of the dinghy hadn’t been the smartest thing. In fact, it was probably right up there with leaping into a blowhole when she was a teenager (her parents still didn’t know about that one). She was deciding whether to keep swimming for shore or go back and try and reach the boat, when her hands struck something solid. She barely felt the grazes to her knuckles as they hit bare rock.
The decision had been made for her. She abandoned all thoughts of the dinghy. Saving herself was the priority. She staggered to her knees as another wave washed her shoreward, tumbling her over the rocks. She tried to get a purchase with her fingers, but the rocks were slippery with weed. Another wave washed over her and she felt her arm bend under her, fingers catching in a crevice.
Stuck.
Willing herself not to panic, she held her breath and fought to wrench her hand free. It was wedged between two immovable slabs of rock. As she pulled it this way and that, stars sparked beneath her closed eyes and bubbles burst from her mouth as she screamed into the water, swearing against the pain and her own stupidity.
Chapter Seventeen
London, Spring 2018
That evening, Eve cooked supper with Radio 4—“the wireless” Grams insisted on calling it—burbling in the background. She paid far less attention to the news reports than usual, for her grandmother’s stories were still swirling in her head. What did she mean when she said that she thought she would never find beauty again? It seemed such a desperate thing to believe, especially
for someone who had been so young at the time. And what about her comment that she had found love, but that it was too late? That was even more perplexing.
The pips sounded the hour and Eve turned off the grill but not the radio. It was the accompaniment to their days. In the early hours of the morning, the sonorous tones of the shipping forecast woke Eve, the never-changing list of names, as familiar as a prayer: Forties, Cromarty, Tyne and Fisher, German Bight, Humber, Fastnet, Fair Isle, and Scilly summoning her to her duties, for her grandmother still needed help reaching the bathroom.
Before lunch, Grams liked to listen to Woman’s Hour—“They’ve had me on a few times, you know,” she told Eve one day as they listened to a female astronaut talk about her life and work.
Late at night Eve could often hear the low-pitched tones of Book at Bedtime floating up the stairwell, for her grandmother liked things at high volume.
Eve was twenty-three. She should have been at the movies with a group of girlfriends, watching a play or listening to a band, or enjoying a well-earned cold drink in the dust of Gunjur with David, not listening to the latest installment of The Archers and heating up a prepared meal. She tried not to mind too much. As she sliced two lonely carrots into rounds and shook frozen broccoli into a saucepan, she wondered what exactly she was going to do with her life once her grandmother was better, whenever that might be. Surely there had to be something as breathtaking as an alpine sunrise in her future. In the London dark it seemed hard to imagine.
* * *
The next day was warmer and the previous week’s snow and slush had melted away, leaving the streets cleansed. When Eve stepped outside she could feel the faint breath of spring in the air. Almost overnight, trees were misted with green and snowdrops poked their delicate heads from among the blades of grass. She walked on the Heath in higher spirits, lifting her face to the sun that shone weakly overhead. The almost imperceptible change of season gave her the feeling that things might be about to alter elsewhere, that the long winter of her grams’s recuperation might nearly be over. Certainly she had been more animated yesterday than Eve had seen her in months and she took it as a good sign. She hoped that they might make more progress that day.
When she returned, after kicking off her muddy boots and leaving them at the door, she brewed a pot of tea and went in to Grams’s room. Placing a cup and saucer down on the dressing table, she noticed that a small jewelry box stood open. It was generally firmly shut, fastened with a tiny gold key that Eve had never turned.
Her grandmother’s eyes were still closed and her breathing was the slow, rhythmical sound of someone fast asleep. Eve’s eyes flicked over to the box again and she risked a glance inside, noticing a pretty silver brooch decorated with flowers. She’d never seen it before, certainly never seen her grandmother wear it. At the center of each flower was a tiny red stone—a ruby she thought. A half-forgotten Bible verse floated through her mind: “Who can find a virtuous woman? For her price is above rubies.” She reached inside and picked it up, turning it over in her hand. There was an inscription on the back: “To the Lady E from her friend R. As a testimony of his esteem. Ex tenebris lux.” What did that mean? And who was R? Not Gramps, that was certain. She remembered her grandmother’s comment the previous day about meeting the right man too late. Was this another clue? Checking on her grams’s still-sleeping form, she wondered about the stories her grandmother had yet to tell her and if she would divulge them all.
She was returning the brooch to the box when she heard the rustle of bedsheets, her grandmother stirring. She walked the few steps to her side, hearing a gasp and drew closer, leaned down, her eyes searching her grandmother’s face. It had lost the calmness of sleep, was scrunched up, lips pursed, a deep furrow between her eyebrows. She was shaking her head from side to side, as if fighting something off. Under the blankets, her legs jerked.
“Robbie. Robbie. The orchard . . . can’t breathe. No air . . .”
A flash of alarm arced through Eve. Was her grandmother having a turn? She wondered if she should summon help.
Then, as suddenly as it had come over her, she was still again, her expression relaxing, the folds of skin settling around the bones of her face.
Eve waited for several minutes to reassure herself that it had been nothing more than a bad dream.
Eventually, she left the room. Tea could wait. But who was Robbie? It wasn’t a name she’d ever heard before. Was he the “R” who’d given Grams the brooch?
Chapter Eighteen
Little Embers, Autumn 1951
Esther’s motives for getting out of the house were not simply the need for exercise. She wanted to reacquaint herself with the jetty, for she had been counting the days until the boat would call again. After digging for clams and filling the bucket that they had brought with them, they walked onward, the hard sand and tidemarks of dark seaweed crunching beneath her shoes. At the far end was the jetty. “So there’s no boat on the island?” she asked.
“I must confess, I never learned to sail. Bit of an oversight, all things considered,” Richard replied.
“So you are as stuck here as we are?”
“Well, I wouldn’t put it like that exactly.”
“And the supply boat comes once a week?” she said, stopping to catch her breath.
“That’s right. Every Friday. Except in really bad weather.”
“In the morning or afternoon?”
Richard looked sideways at her. “Depends on the tide—she needs high tide to be able to dock at the jetty. Why? Is there anything you particularly need?”
“Oh no, nothing really. Idle curiosity.” She wasn’t sure he believed her, but she had the information she needed, for now.
* * *
When Esther woke on Friday she went straight to the window to check on the weather. For the first time, the nurse had not wrapped her in the straitjacket the night before. The weals on her arms and torso had healed well, and she noticed no new damage as she pushed aside the curtains. To her relief, the sun shone faintly through a thin layer of clouds. The boat would come; she just had to make sure she didn’t miss it.
The day before, she had asked the doctor for some notepaper and a pen, saying she wanted to begin to write down her feelings about the events that had brought her to Embers, that it might help. It had been a lie. She used the paper to write to John, to insist that he come and get her. She wrote, her hands flying over the pages, telling him how much she missed both him and Teddy, and that Teddy surely needed her. She implored him in the strongest possible terms to allow her to come home, promising that she was quite better and ready to be a wife and mother again. When she was finished, she folded the note carefully, wrote the address on one side and sealed it with several drops of wax from her candle. The letter was her only hope of escape from this infernal place.
In the days since her arrival, she had become fond of the other men, and even Robbie’s ruined face no longer shocked her as much as it first had. In turn, they treated her with politeness and respect, and were rather amusing company at mealtimes. Robbie, in particular, had been kind. One morning, she had ventured to the vegetable garden—a large rectangle that featured orderly rows of cabbages, purple heads of broccoli, spinach, leeks, Brussels sprouts and the golden tops of onions, their green shoots tied off for winter—and watched him digging potatoes from the dark, loamy soil. He began to tell her what had brought him to the island. “I flew Wellingtons, a nice big kite, but do you know, when I crashed all I felt was the sheer relief of not having to fly the damn thing anymore. I don’t know how we got out of the plane—I was unconscious and the bloody thing caught on fire. Broke my tibia, fibula, mandible, not to mention melting half my face . . .” He said all of this without a trace of self-pity. “We were over France and it was tremendously cold, the day before Christmas Eve actually. There was snow on the ground when we landed. The Germans found us and took us to a field hospital in Valmont. That’s where my rear-gunner—he didn’t survive the crash—was
buried. I found out later that they dug two graves that day.” He jabbed the ground with his garden fork. “They didn’t expect me to make it either, but somehow I did. Then I was moved to Rouen, to another hospital, had numerous operations, nearly lost my leg, and eventually ended up in Stalag Nine. That’s when things got a bit rough. Still, nothing lasts forever, does it?”
Esther was astonished. She had heard about prisoner-of-war camps of course, but to actually meet someone who had been in one, well that was a different kettle of fish entirely. “How on earth did you survive?”
“We lived on acorn coffee, potato bread, and occasionally a bit of stew. We were all thin as rakes.”
She hadn’t meant what they lived on, rather how they got through it, but she didn’t interrupt.
“There was a Prussian doctor, he loved to do minor operations without an anesthetic. He took the wire out of my jaw without one.”
Esther tried not to look shocked.
“It was four years before I was repatriated. The day I’d dreamed of, the moment that had kept me going through all those dark times. But when I arrived back at HQ they invalided me out. Out of the air force forever. I tell you, I’ve never felt so low as I did that day. All I’d been through and then they turned around and said they couldn’t have me, didn’t want me.” He pushed his hair off his face until it sat even more wildly. “Rough trot, don’t you know? After everything I’d put up with. They tossed me aside like a broken toy. What was it all for anyway? That’s the thing I don’t understand. King and country?” He laughed, a hollow sound that was fast snatched away by the wind. “They didn’t repay the sacrifice. Not one bit.”
“Oh, Robbie, that’s just awful.” Esther could barely comprehend what he, and the others, must have had to go through. She felt even more of a fraud for being at Embers at all. These men needed the treatment Dr. Creswell was offering; she really didn’t. “But what brought you here, if you don’t mind me asking? The war’s been over for a while.”