The minutes expand like hours, every moment bringing a bigger wave to dowse me with frigid water and render me almost blind with the sting of salt in my eyes. Mam’s words tumble through my mind. A storm should be respected, but never feared. Show it you’re afraid, and you’re already halfway to dead. I rage back at the wind, telling it I am not afraid, ignoring the deep burn of the muscles in my forearms. I have never felt more alone or afraid but I am determined to persevere.
Eventually, three hunched figures emerge from the gloom. Men. Bloodied and bruised. Their clothes torn. Shoeless. Bedraggled. They barely resemble human beings. So shocked by their appearance, I take a moment to react, but gather my wits sufficiently to maneuver the coble alongside the rocks.
“Quickly. Climb in,” I shout, pulling all the time on the oars to hold the boat as steady as I can.
The men clamber and fall into the boat, one quietly, two wincing with the pain of each step, the flux in weight and balance tipping the boat wildly as they stumble forward. The two injured men are too stupefied to speak. The other thanks me through chattering teeth as he takes an oar from my frozen hands.
“I’ll help keep her steady, miss.”
Reluctantly, I let go. Only then do I notice the ache in my arms and wrists and realize how hard I’ve been gripping the oars.
“How many more?” I ask, wiping salt water from my eyes.
“Six alive,” he replies.
“And the rest?”
He shakes his head. “Some escaped on the quarter boat. The rest … lost.” Water streams from his shirtsleeves in heavy ribbons, puddling in the bottom of the boat where several inches of seawater have already settled.
My arms and legs tremble from my exertions as I clamber aft to tend to one of the injured men. He stares at me numbly, muttering in his delirium that I must be an angel from Heaven.
“I am no angel, sir. I’m from the Longstone light. You’re safe now. Don’t try to talk.”
The boat pitches and rolls violently as I tend to him, my thoughts straying back to the rock, wondering what is keeping my father.
To my great relief, he appears through the rain a moment later, staggering toward the boat with a woman in his arms, barely alive by the look of her. As he lifts her into the boat, she kicks and struggles to free herself from his grasp, falling onto the rocks. She crawls away from him on her hands and knees, screaming like an animal caught in a trap. Father scoops her up again, calling to me as he lifts her into the boat. “Take her, Grace,” but she slips from my arms and slumps against the boards like a just-landed fish before clambering to her feet and trying to climb out again.
The uninjured man helps me to hold her back. “You must stay in the boat, Mrs. Dawson,” he urges. “You must.”
“You’re safe now,” I assure her as she grabs at my skirts and my shawl. “We’re taking you back to the lighthouse.”
Whatever she says in response, I can’t fully make out. Only the words, “my children” swirl around me before she lets out the most mournful sound and I am glad of a great gust of wind that drowns it out with its greater volume.
Back in the boat, Father takes up his oars, pushing us away from the rocks.
“What of the others?” I call, horrified that we are leaving some of the survivors behind.
“Can’t risk taking any more in these seas,” he shouts. “I’ll have to come back for them.”
“But the woman’s children! We can’t leave them!”
A shake of his head is all the explanation I need and in a terrible instant I understand that it is too late for them. We are too late for them.
As we set out again into the writhing sea, the three remaining survivors huddle together on the rock, waiting for Father to return. But it is not to them my gaze is drawn. My eyes settle on two much smaller forms lying to the left of the others, still and lifeless, hungry waves lapping at little boots. I am reminded of my brother Job, laid out after being taken from us by a sudden fever. I remember how I fixed my gaze on his boots, still covered with sawdust from his apprenticeship as a joiner, unable to bring myself to look at the pale lifeless face that had once been so full of smiles. I turn my face away from the rock and pray for the sea to spare the children’s bodies as I turn my attention to Mrs. Dawson who has slipped into a faint. I am glad; relieved that she is spared the agony of watching the rock fade into the distance as we row away from her children.
After an almighty struggle, the coble finally moves out of the heaviest seas and around to the lee side of the islands, which offers us some shelter. The relentless wind and lashing rain diminish a little and a curious calm descends over the disheveled party in the boat, each of us searching for answers among the menacing clouds above, while Father and his fellow oarsman focus on navigating us safely back to Longstone. I glance around the coble, distressed by the scene of torn clothes, ripped skin, shattered bones and broken hearts. I pray that I will never see anything like it again.
I tend to the two injured men first, fashioning a makeshift tourniquet from my shawl before giving them each a nip of brandy and a blanket and assuring them we don’t have far to go. I return to Mrs. Dawson then, still slumped in the bottom of the boat, her head lolling against the side. I hold her upright and place a blanket over her. She wakes suddenly, her eyes wild as she wails for her children, her hands gripping mine so hard I want to cry out with the pain but absorb it quietly, knowing it is nothing compared to hers. “My babies,” she cries, over and over. “My beautiful babies.”
As she slips into another faint and the boat tosses our stricken party around like rag dolls, I hold her against my chest, my heart full of anguish because I can do nothing but wrap my arms around her shaking shoulders and try to soothe her, knowing it will never be enough. I wonder, just briefly, if it might have been kinder for her to have perished with her children, rather than live without them. Closing my eyes, I pray that she might somehow find the courage to endure this dreadful calamity.
That we all might.
Longstone Lighthouse. 7th September, 1838
WHEN SARAH DAWSON opens her eyes, the sky is chalky gray above her. She looks at the young woman called Grace whose eyes are as gentle as a summer breeze and whose hands grip her shoulders. She watches numbly as the boat sets out again, back toward the wreck.
Her arms are empty. Where are her children? In a panic she struggles and falls to her knees. “They are afraid of the dark, Miss,” she sobs, clinging to the young woman’s sodden skirts, tearing at the fabric with her fingernails as if she might somehow crawl her way out of this hell she finds herself in. “And they will be ever so cold. I have to go back. I have to.”
The young woman tells her she is safe now. “My father will being your children back, Mrs. Dawson.
