of cold made her yelp. The water was always cold here.
She grasped the prow and dragged the canoe up on to the stones. There was no one else on the island this afternoon, no other boat or beached sailboard and no sign of swimmers or picnickers. Once her canoe was safe above the tideline she hoisted her pack on to her shoulder and began to pick her way across the sand. In the wrack along the water’s edge she found the prehistoric-looking shell of a helmet crab. She examined it and trailed on, holding the thing by the tip of the jointed tail so that it banged dully against her thigh. There were other different shells caught in the washed-up debris. She squatted down to examine their shape and quality before pocketing them or hurling them out into the water.
Neither Ivy nor John had come back to the house at lunchtime.
May was used to making meals for herself, but today she had sullenly rejected the option and eaten a pack of Oreos instead. Her stomach was distended and she could still taste the sugar thick in the back of her throat. There was no wind, not even the smallest stirring to ruffle the water or cool her face. Beads of sweat pricked her top lip. She felt sick and solitary, and disgusted with herself.
It was the day’s motionless hour when time seemed to hang for ever between early and late. Even the shade within the woodland looked bruised and resentful. May dragged a few steps away from the water and sat down in the sand. In her backpack were some more cookies, but she stopped herself from reaching for them. Instead she took out the book she had brought with her, one of the two that she had borrowed from Aaron and Hannah Fennymore. The books that Doone might, or might not, have read. Listlessly she flipped open the warped board cover and began to skim the pages.
The ship’s log records that the Dolphin sailed from Nantucket on 1 May 1841, under the command of Captain Charles S. Gunnell. She was bound for the Cape Verde Islands and the west coast of Africa with a full crew of experienced officers and good men. Captain Gunnell was recognised as a fair master and a lucky whaleman.
Among the crew that left the sanctuary of Nantucket harbour on that spring morning was a green hand who had signed up for the voyage only two days before. He was eighteen years old and slightly built, but he assured Mr Gunnell most vehemently that he was a strong worker and ready to learn the whaler’s craft, and that he wanted nothing more than to take his share of risk and reward aboard the Dolphin.
The boy gave his name as William Corder. The crew-list indicated that he was a ‘down-easter’, a native of Maine.
The early part of the Dolphin’s voyage was without incident. The new hand did indeed prove to be willing and quick to learn the duties of the ship. He possessed courage enough for a man twice his size, showing no fear when sent aloft to furl a sail. And he could keep his head and secure footing when the ship’s head fell from the wind and the sail filled with enough force to tear a man from the yard and pitch him into oblivion.
But William Corder was sadly afflicted by seasickness. For all of his first month at sea he struggled with severe attacks, sometimes to such a degree that the first mate sent him to his bunk to groan out the worst of his trouble in peace. This perceived weakness caused some of the more experienced hands to joke about him, and to suggest that his smallness and gentlemanly demeanour would fit him better for a lady’s parlour or a draper’s shop than for the forecastle of a whaling vessel.
Then, after the first weeks of misery, William overcame his affliction overnight. He awoke one morning in his bunk and told his companions that he would never be ill again. His prediction proved correct. However rough the seas and however viciously the stubby vessel pitched and rolled, William steadily continued in his work from that day forward. He was not a high-spirited young man, never indulging in horseplay or coarse behaviour with the other hands with whom his life in the forecastle was necessarily shared, but he was always good-humoured and willing to apply himself to whatever the officers required of him.
For his quiet and modest demeanour he slowly gained the respect of his fellows, but their liking was bestowed on him in time for a different reason.
By the very nature of their arduous life, the whalemen’s clothes were frequently bathed in perspiration, coated with whale oil and grease and dirt of every description, and saturated with sea water. Any cleansing of their few articles of clothing had to be performed with cold salt water and the roughest soap, so this necessary labour was among the least popular of all the deckhands’ duties.
But William Corder, it was soon noted, went about the business of laundering his clothes in the deftest manner. He would stand up to the wooden tub containing water set aside for the purpose, and rub the soap into his loose sailor’s shirts and breeches in a shipshape fashion that betokened long familiarity with the washtub.
One of the hands chanced to make a passing joke about this unlikely talent, and William blushed and let his shirt fall back with a splash into the water. But he quickly explained that he was the youngest of several brothers whose mother had died of the fever when he was still an infant. While his father and brothers attended to the heavier domestic chores, as William grew up it became his responsibility to launder all the family’s clothing. ‘I have had a good deal of practice,’ he said, smiling a little. ‘I could not begin to count up the number of shirts I have washed in my life.’
‘Do you miss the privilege, then?’ one of the older hands asked mischievously. ‘Because if you do, you may certainly scrub mine for me.’
‘I’ll do it gladly,’ William replied.
So it happened that William Corder cheerfully undertook laundry duties for his crew-mates, continuing to perform the disagreeable work with a neatness and economy that did indeed speak of years of practice. William accepted whatever small payments of coin the deckhands were able to offer him in return for his services, but he had no interest whatsoever in the more common currencies of tobacco and rum.
The Dolphin continued her voyage towards the fertile whaling grounds of the Central Atlantic with William as an accepted member of the crew. It was noted that whenever the vessel drew alongside another whaling ship for an exchange of news or the barter of other sought-after shipboard commodities, William was the first of the sailors to run to the rail and scan the faces of the opposing crew.
‘Are you looking for someone, young Will?’ the mate enquired one day.
William’s face coloured up again. He was young and beardless, and his fair skin showed his blushes for everyone to see. ‘My brother. My brother Robert signed to a ship a year ago and I would be more pleased to see him than any other person in the world.’
‘What ship is he aboard, under what master?’ the mate asked curiously. Something about this story stirred his interest, although he could not have explained exactly why.
‘I don’t know the name of either,’ William said quickly, and turned away from the rail when the strange faces across the neck of water did not include the one he searched for.
Bored by the old-fashioned language and impatient with the close-set type, May looked up. A woman was standing under the trees, motionless, watching her.
At first May thought it was Ivy or Gail. But it wasn’t either of them, nor any of the other women from the houses on the bluff. She was wearing loose, wide trousers that hid her feet and a colourless shirt with some kind of deep collar. Her hair was pulled severely back from her pale face.
Stillness lay across the rocks and flattened the sea and pressed on May, so that she found she could not move. A chain of tiny cold droplets trickled down her spine. She stretched her fingers and they touched the discarded crab shell. She picked it up again and slowly, against the heavy weight of the air, she lifted her
