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When the morning light began to thin the gloom Sarah was able to look around her. The few articles left inside the shelter were instantly familiar. There was a long-handled spade whose once-sharp blade was now rusty with disuse and a wooden bucket. The spade would have been used for severing the tendons of a whale’s flukes, and for cutting deep incisions in the blubber by which the creature could be roped and towed back to the whaling ship for dismemberment, and the bucket was just the same as the one she had used for bailing sea water at Matthias’s shouted command. From a peg on the wall looped a coil of whale line and on a shelf above it stood a brave row of pewter tankards.
The shelter into which she had stumbled was a whalers’ refuge, a rough tavern for the crews of the small boats seeking to capture those whales which came close in to the shore. Their business must have been a disappointment because the place had been abandoned. But the irony at having fetched up in such a resort made Sarah’s mouth twist in a bitter smile.
She waited out the daylight in the ruined tavern, venturing out into the wind-tossed open only once, to drink a mouthful of water from a brackish spring and gather a stained handful of wild berries to eat.
When night fell once more the wind dropped at last, but huge seas still battered the growling shingle. Sarah knew there could be no waiting for the waves to subside; she must row back to the mainland and do the deed that was waiting for her. She slipped through the trees and over the rocks to the beach, where the dory lay waiting for her. No fishermen from Pittsharbor had put to sea today.
Somehow she found the strength to propel the boat through the swell and spume to the bay shore. Drenched to the skin and light-headed with thirst and hunger she staggered across the shingle and climbed the rocks of the bluff. The soft lamplight shone from the windows of Robert and Charlotte Hanner’s house.
Tonight she lacked even the cunning to try to conceal herself. She dragged herself to the nearest window and pressed her numb face to it.
A young woman sat within, dark-haired and dark-browed, with her head bowed in tender contemplation of the infant in her lap. In the background her husband busied himself with some small domestic business. The three of them were bathed in light and warmth, with the baby helpless and soft-limbed at the centre of the tableau.
Sarah’s mouth stretched wide in a silent howl. She knew she could not murder Robert Hanner. The determination she had nourished melted away like icicles in May and left her with nothing. The emptiness in her heart was worse than hatred; it was resignation and death itself.
The young wife looked up and saw the face at the window. Her scream as she snatched the child to her breast was so shrill that its echoes cut through the boiling of the waves and silenced them. Sarah turned and ran from the world for the last time.
She took the dory out once more and rowed through the wicked surf to the island. She waded the last few steps with the undertow ravenous at her legs and fell in exhaustion on to the bay shore. The boat tossed in the breakers and was carried away from her.
Somehow Sarah found her way over the island’s crest to her last shelter. She spent one more long night huddled in the tavern corner and when the dirty light of morning crept around her once again she stood upright. She wrote some lines on a piece of paper from her pocketbook and printed the man’s name on the folded sheet, before tucking it securely into her clothing. Then she picked up her bag with the few belongings and the knife that had lain on the earth floor beside her. She carried both of them down to the shore and dropped the bag into the sea. It wallowed at her feet for a moment, a waterlogged torso, then the current sucked it away. The knife she threw after it. It made a cold arc as it flew through the air.
She went slowly back to the whalers’ hut and took the line down from its peg. Whaleline was both strong and light, the finest exemplar of the ropemaker’s art. The best hemp was impregnated with tar vapour and three strands of seventeen yarns each were woven together, every one of those strands separately tested to sustain a burden of one hundred and twelve pounds. Her own meagre weight would make no impression on such a piece of line.
Above the shelter there was a sturdy oak tree with a convenient branch some seven feet from the ground. She climbed into the tree and tied one end of the line to a branch over her head. She lowered the free end and measured the drop with her eye. Then, using the boatman’s hitches that Matthias Plant had taught her aboard the Dolphin, she fashioned the noose.
She did not sit long on her perch with the sea’s merciless chorus loud in her ears. She closed her eyes and dropped into silent space.
They stood at the doorway looking in. Ivy peered past her father’s shoulder, twisting a strand of night-tousled hair across her mouth. May’s bedroom was empty. It smelt unused.
‘I don’t know,’ she muttered in answer to John’s sharp question. ‘Last night some time. Before I went out. I don’t know what time I saw her.’
John pushed into the room. He patted the smooth bedclothes as if he might be able to detect the warmth of her body, rattled the catch of the window and ran through the line of clothes in the closet. Then he turned back to Ivy and his face reflected the fear within him as it ran and leaped into the recesses of his imagination. ‘She must have been out all night.’
But when he had come in from Haselboro, from lying in a maze of indecision with Leonie in his arms, he had found his own bedclothes twisted and pushed aside. For reasons he couldn’t begin to fathom someone had tried to sleep in his bed. He had seen the evidence, but had let it lie in the back of his mind because his thoughts were busy with Leonie. The girls’ bedroom doors were closed, the house lights were off and he had assumed they were both safe in their beds. He had taken his own concerns to sleep with him and had not missed May until she failed to appear for breakfast. He was standing at the window watching the crinkled skin of the sea when a shiver of disquiet made him turn back to look at the stairs. The leaf and flower carvings decorating the banister glinted with static menace.
He ran up the stairs two at a time. In May’s room the bed was empty and the covers undisturbed.
He dragged Ivy out of her own bed, and now they stood with the backwash of disbelief and sudden anxiety slapping between them.
‘She won’t be far away,’ Ivy muttered. ‘She’s probably only gone, only …’ and her voice trailed away as she tried to come up with an explanation for her absence. May didn’t have friends, not up here. She mooched around the house or the beach, or drifted irritatingly in the wake of everyone else. John’s fear stirred an answering apprehension in Ivy. ‘I don’t know where she can be,’ she whispered. ‘I saw her, like, before I went out to meet Lucas last night. I left her here, watching TV or something. Lucas and me and the others went out to the island for a bit, just an hour or something. We lit a fire and hung out, but it was sort of cold over there, you know, and there wasn’t much happening. So we just came back and I went off with Lucas for a bit, not back to his place because it’s kind of heavy there right now.’
They were boxed in by truths that it had been easier not to confront and now by unthinkable new possibilities. Ivy took a breath and launched herself at them. ‘It’s heavy because Leonie has left Tom, okay, and there’s family stuff going on. But you know about all that, don’t you? Maybe May going off has got something to do with it.’
‘Why?’
‘She was upset last night. We were talking about the old days, you know? Like, before Mom died.’
John walked the confined width of the room and back again. He pressed his hands together to try to ease the tension that twisted his sinews. He could hear breaking glass, the tapping of rain in the night and the predatory sea, and his mind raced ahead of him, breaking out of reason. ‘What did you say?’
‘Something about Jack O’Donnell.’
‘What about him?’
‘She knew.’ Ivy shrugged,