LITMIR.BIZ

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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 that 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

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