Beyond Sunrise

by Candice Proctor

  India straightened her elbow and pushed herself up on her splayed hand, her gaze caught by the way the yacht rode low in the water and listed oddly to one side. “Jack,” she said softly. “Jack, wake up.”

  Something in her voice must have warned him. He sat up suddenly, his eyes narrowing as he twisted around to stare down at the purple-blue waters of the bay below. “What the hell?” he said, pushing to his feet.

  India shoved her bare arms into her shirt and reached for her tartan skirt, but Jack had already taken off at a run, his bare feet pounding the hard dirt of the path as he sprinted, naked, down the hill. Far below, as if pushed by an unseen hand, the Sea Hawk swung about slowly on its anchor chain, the gentle surf breaking over the unnaturally low deck.

  “Oh, shitfire!” Jack screamed. “No.” He lifted his arms up, wide, his hands clenching into fists that he let fall, helplessly, to his sides as the Sea Hawk gave one last gurgle, and sank beneath the waves.

  Chapter Thirty-one

  THEY SAT SIDE by side at the edge of the black sandy beach, their gazes fixed on the empty waters of the bay before them. Even without squinting, India could still make out the shadow that was the Sea Hawk, plainly visible through the clear, clean water.

  “Is it possible to raise it?” she asked, her arms wrapped around her bent knees.

  “Maybe. Patu says the men of the village are willing to help try.”

  She swung her head to look at him. “How long would that take?”

  Jack let out his breath in a long sigh. “I don’t know. It’s not going to be easy. And God knows what we’ll need to get her seaworthy again, even if we can raise her. The monsoon season isn’t that far away anymore.”

  India nodded. The shifting wind brought to them a fine spray that felt cool against her cheeks and smelled sweetly of the open sea. “If I had never come to you, or if I’d listened when you said you couldn’t take me to Takaku, none of this would have—”

  His fingertips touched her lips, stopping her. “No. Don’t say it. Don’t even think it. It would have happened. The Barracuda came out here under orders to see me brought to justice. The Prime Minister himself is after my blood.” His fingers rubbed across her lower lip, then drifted over her cheek and down her neck in a soft caress that was there, then gone. “Ten years is too long to run. I should have faced it all long ago.”

  She took his hand in hers. It was a big hand, strong and tanned and scarred from his years at sea, his years on the run. “And if the Lady Juliana’s charts and log have been lost? If you can’t prove your innocence?”

  He squinted out over the tropical blue sea. “I don’t know. I’m tired of running. Tired of hiding.” His hand shifted in hers. “India . . .” He paused. His thumb was making circular patterns on the back of her hand, and he watched it intently, as if it were the most important thing in the world at that moment. Then he lifted his head to look straight at her and said, “Marry me.”

  India felt herself go so cold and still inside, it seemed for a moment as if her heart had stopped.

  I love you, he had whispered to her last night. Love you, love you. She’d heard him, but she hadn’t really believed him. Somehow, she had convinced herself that the caring was all on her side, that everything was still for him the way it had begun for her—a heat, a wanting. An appetite easily and casually appeased. Nothing more.

  “I mean, if I can clear my name,” he was saying, his dark eyebrows drawing together as he studied her face. “I wouldn’t ask it of you otherwise. I hadn’t intended to say anything until I knew what kind of future I had to offer you. But after last night, I thought you ought to know where my heart is.”

  His words humbled her. She would never have had the courage to say something that had the power to make her that vulnerable. She found her chest ached, and she drew in a deep breath, trying to ease it. When that didn’t work, she took another.

  Ever since she’d been old enough to consider such things, she’d told herself she would never marry. Not even the dawning awareness of the profound depth of her feelings for Jack had provoked her into changing her mind. Even if she had believed in marriage, she wasn’t sure she’d have been able to bring herself to become this man’s wife. He was too wild and irreverent, too much a rebel, too . . . dangerous.

  The skin beside his eyes crinkled, as if he were thinking about smiling, but couldn’t quite manage it. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you speechless before.”

  “You know how I feel about marriage,” she said finally, grasping wildly for something to say, something that wouldn’t require her to be as honest as he was being. “My opinion of what marriage means for a woman.”

  “Then marry me in an island ceremony. Just you and me, promising our love to each other. No government certification, no one-person-before-the-law-and-the-husband-is-that-person.”

  “It wouldn’t work.”

  He was no longer smiling, not even with his eyes. “Why not?”

  In the blue sky above the bay, a gull soared, riding a warm updraft. India watched the bird wheel, its call so sweet and sad it seemed to tear her heart. “Because . . .” She had to stop and swallow before she could go on. “Because I love to travel, whereas you want nothing more than to settle down and make a home.”

  “So, we settle down and make a home, and then we travel.”

  “Settle where?” She let her gaze drift around the bay, struck, as she always was, by the vibrancy of color here. The cobalt blue of the water, the vividness of the sky, the saturated gold of the sunlight pouring down on a tangle of intertwined greens of every imaginable hue splashed with blooms of crimson and cadmium yellow and brilliant, pure white. “In Edinburgh? The sea is gray there. Did you know? The sea, and the sky, and the houses . . . everything is gray.”

  “I’ll go to Scotland, if that’s what you want.” He paused, then added, his voice tight, “If I can.”

  India shook her head. She couldn’t imagine him in Scotland. He belonged here, in this southern land of waving palm trees and sun-warmed sand, where the trade winds blew wild and free across the ocean, and the sky was so full of stars at night that it made a body feel lonesome and sad, just looking at them. “You might think you could live there, but it would kill you. One day at a time.”

  “And what do you think it’ll do to me, living here without you?”

  Her gaze met his, and it came to her that his eyes were the exact shade of blue as a deep, tropical sea, and that she could look at them forever and never get tired of it. She swallowed, trying to answer him, but her throat had become so swollen and tight she couldn’t push the words out.

  “You’re just making excuses,” he said suddenly, those vivid blue eyes of his narrowing, darkening. “You know that, don’t you?”

  She scrambled to her feet, the constriction about her throat instantly gone. “Excuses!”

  He rose more slowly, his hands settling on his lean hips in that quintessentially masculine stance of his. “That’s right.”

  She brought up one clenched fist and thumped it against her chest for emphasis. “I’m being practical.”

  “Uh-un.” He leaned into her, his nostrils flaring with a quick, angry breath. “The truth is, you’re afraid. And you’re too bloody dishonest with yourself even to admit it.”

  She scooped up her knapsack from where she’d left it lying in the sand, and practically shook it under his nose. “I’m not afraid of anything.”

  He knocked her hand away from his face. “That’s bullshit, and you know it. Oh, you might not be afraid of traveling around the world by yourself, or exploring a cave filled with moldy old skeletons. But there’s a hell of a lot you are afraid of, and I don’t mean just reasonable things, like swinging bridges and sharks. You’re terrified of being late, or looking foolish, or just simply admitting to anyone, least of all yourself, that you get lonely sometimes. Or that deep, deep down, you really would like to have children, and a man to love you, except that you’re too afraid of making a bad choice, t
he way your mother did.”

  She let out a bitter, false laugh. “You dare? You dare to lecture me about courage, when you’re the one who’s been too afraid to go back to Rakaia and face up to what happened there!”

  It was a cruel, cutting thing to say, and she would have taken it back instantly if she could, except that it was already too late. A line of dark color appeared to ride high on his sharp cheekbones, and his head snapped back as if she had slapped him.

  “At least I know what I’m running from,” he said, his voice low and even and carefully, flawlessly modulated. “But you . . . you don’t even know you’re running.”

  He turned around then and left her there, at the edge of that strange black beach, with her knapsack clutched to her chest and a sick weight of despair riding low in her belly. And she realized, as she watched him walk away from her, that never had she felt more afraid, or more alone than she did in that moment.

  India hesitated at the base of the bungalow’s steps, one hand on the railing, her head turning toward the sound of Cynthia Watson’s merry laugh. The woman was standing beside a clothesline strung between two erythrina trees, one of the reverend’s wet shirts held, momentarily forgotten, in her hands, her back arching as she looked up at a couple of yellow and green noisy pittas.

  Turning, India walked toward her.

  India might be critical of many of the results of the missionaries’ work, but she still had to admire them. This was no easy life to which the Watsons had dedicated themselves. The islands of the South Pacific were scattered with the graves of missionaries’ wives, and their children.

  “Miss McKnight,” said Cynthia Watson, looking around as India walked up to her. “Good morning! What did you think of last night’s luau?”

  “It was good material for the book I’m writing,” India said warily.

  The reverend’s wife ducked her head to hide a smile. “William was furious, of course, when he heard they were having it. But I thought you would enjoy it.”

  “Is there a steamer that comes by here?” India asked, reaching into the basket at her feet and bringing up a wet apron she pegged on the line.

  “Going which direction?”

  India almost said, Any direction. But then she remembered her trunk, sitting in the Limerick in Neu Brenenberg, and said, “West.”

  “The Fijian is due tomorrow or the next day. But it’ll probably be the last one until April.”

  India nodded. They called it the Tunnel, that long, tense period running from December to April, when the rains fell incessantly, and the danger of encountering a fierce storm kept most ships and boats in harbor. It made the isolation faced by those manning these far-flung outposts so severe that white traders and missionaries and their wives had been known to go mad, or simply give up and die, waiting for the Tunnel to end. India had been hoping to make it to Pepeete before the rains came. As it was, she’d be lucky not to be stranded on Neu Brenen.

  Mrs. Watson shook out a wet petticoat and hung it on the line. “It’s a good thing you weren’t still at sea when that boat took it into her head to sink. But William had a look at her this morning, and he says he thinks they should be able to raise her.”

  “I might not be waiting for that.”

  Cynthia Watson looked around. “But I thought—” She broke off and bit her lip, then laughed. “Silly me. I don’t know where I got the notion you and Mr. Ryder were, well, you know.”

  India felt her cheeks heat with discomfort. “We only just met. I hired his boat.”

  “Mr. Watson and I knew each other less than three weeks before we were wed. He was due to set sail for Waigeu when we met, so there was no time for a prolonged courtship.”

  India stared at the other woman’s full-cheeked, merry face. “You weren’t afraid?”

  “Of coming here? What was there to fear, with God leading our way?”

  “I meant, marrying someone you didn’t know.”

  India expected the woman to say she’d had God leading her in that, as well. Instead, a strange, secret smile lit up Cynthia Watson’s pale gray eyes, and she said simply, “I knew him.”

  It was Patu who took India to see the ancient burial complex, the marae, that Jack had told her about.

  Built at the edge of the tidal plain below the village, the marae was one of the largest such places she’d ever seen. Thousands upon thousands of dark gray stones had been hauled down from the mountains and piled up to form walls some two hundred feet long and perhaps fifteen feet high. At first, she simply walked around the outside of it, stumbling occasionally over stones half buried in the rioting vegetation of the encroaching jungle, her head falling back as she looked up into the spreading limbs of giant old maape trees thrusting up from inside the enclosure. The whole place looked deserted and forlorn and sad.

  “Does no one ever come here?” she asked.

  Patu shook his head. “It’s taboo.” Forbidden.

  India glanced over at him. “I thought the islanders were all Christians now.”

  A smile flashed wide and quick across his face. “So they say. But they still don’t come here.”

  India paused between the two giant slabs of basalt that formed the marae’s portal. It was like entering some ancient cathedral, she thought; a cathedral torn open to the sky, a place of peace that seemed, contradictorily, to hum with an energy she found almost frightening.

  “You can go inside,” Patu said, when she continued to hesitate. “It’s all right.”

  She took a step forward, reluctant to disturb the strange aura of this place, yet oddly drawn by it, as well. Her boots made soft swishing noises in the high grass as she passed through a small antechamber and into the interior courtyard, a vast empty rectangle filled with only maape trees, and a tangle of creeping fig and shrubs, and grasses bending softly in the wind coming off the sea. Here and there, a few fragments of bone showed dull white in the fierce tropical sunlight, splintered shafts of long bones and small, weathered vertebrae and the thin, serrated pieces of a crushed skull. But that was all.

  “Where are all the people who were once here?” she asked, her voice echoing oddly in the empty stone chamber.

  “Father Paul had the bones gathered up when I was a boy, and given a Christian burial.” Patu was prowling about the enclosure, parting bushes and pulling back mats of creepers to study the various tall, upright slabs of stone that had been set about seemingly at random. Suddenly he called out, “Here it is. Come see.”

  She joined him on the far side of the marae, and found herself staring at an upright stone deeply carved with a relief of a squatting, almost fetuslike creature with enormous round eyes and a wide mouth. His stunted legs were bent beneath him, his hands on his fat belly. He looked both faintly ridiculous and utterly evil. India fumbled in her knapsack for her notebook and pencil. “What god is this?”

  Patu shrugged. “I don’t know. We used to have many gods. The people thought that a god, if properly worshiped, should serve them and bring luck. If he didn’t, then . . . pffff.” He made an outward sweeping motion with his hands, and grinned. “The god would be abandoned, and a new one chosen.”

  India laughed softly. “Now, that’s a threat calculated to make a god behave.” She glanced around the deserted, windswept enclosure, and felt an uncharacteristic shiver dance up her spine. “And the spirits of the people who used to be buried here?” she asked softly. “Where are they?”

  Patu’s smile faded. “Most have gone to a better place. But not all. Some stay. They call them the tupapau. You see them at night, when the moon is full, in just that moment when it rises above the sea. It’s said they sing as sweetly as the wind, their songs ancient tales composed in the old, forgotten languages. But they’ll tear open your throat or gouge out your eyes if they see you.”

  In spite of the hot sun pouring down out of the tropical blue sky, India felt herself shiver. “They’re evil, then?”

  Patu nodded. “Animal spirits can be friendly, but human ghosts are alway
s evil.” He turned, the wind ruffling his long dark hair as he let his gaze travel over the tumbled, moss-grown stones. “Of course, no one believes in the old stories anymore,” he said softly.

  “Do you?”

  He shook his head, his lips pressing together, tight. “They’re just legends, myths. And yet . . . they contain some truth within them. Something that shouldn’t be lost. Forgotten.”

  “Jack told me once that you left Waigeu with him because you wanted to learn the ways of your father.”

  He nodded, his expression growing troubled as he stared down at the image of the ancient, forsaken god at his feet. “And now I want to stay here, to make sure the ways of my mother’s people aren’t forgotten.” He looked at her, his features pinched with indecision and a deep, inner torment. “Do you think that’s wrong?”

  “No,” she said, reaching out to touch his arm. “No, I don’t.”

  After Patu left her, India settled in the shade of a big old papaya tree with her notebook in her lap. She was lost in thought when a sudden, loud braying brought her head up with a start, and she found herself staring at Jack Ryder, seated astride a neat chestnut hack and leading a sulky-looking, dun-colored donkey toward her.

  He sat tall and easy in the saddle, his legs long in the stirrups, the reins held lightly in his hands. It occurred to her, looking at him, that he was as at home on a horse as he was on a sailboat. But then, she remembered, he’d grown up on a station in Australia.

  “Wherever did you get those?” she asked, deliberately keeping her voice light when he reined in before her. She hadn’t seen him since that disastrous conversation on the beach, and she wasn’t sure where it had left him. Where it had left them.

  There was a tightness about his mouth, a wariness in his eyes that she hadn’t seen before. “They’re on loan from the vanilla grower.”

  She glanced up at the peaks rising high and jagged behind the village. Now that they couldn’t sail to the south of the island, the only way to get there was by going overland. But he’d only borrowed two mounts.