any more,’ she whispered. Get on with my life. Is that really what he wants?
When there was no response she tried, ‘Can’t we talk about adoption?’
‘We have talked about it. I don’t want to adopt.’
It was true. Through sleepless nights and dry-mouthed car journeys, and dinners that turned into a wasteland of crumbed table-cloths they had followed the same thread. Now they had wound their way into the heart of the labyrinth only to find there was no heart. There was only a blank wall and nowhere to go beyond it.
The desire for a fight had gone out of her. She was left with little except an aversion to the stink of rockweed and the boneyard of dead trees. A fisherman in his lobster boat puttered across the middle distance, turning a furrow of white water as he rounded in on his floats. ‘Okay,’ she said flatly. As an ending it couldn’t have been less of a whisper. ‘I think I’ll walk back now.’
Leonie stood up, straightening her back because sitting hunched over had put a crease in it. Above her she saw a woman steadily climbing the slope away from the shore. Her pale-coloured clothing showed like a shaft of light between the dark verticals of the spruce trunks. It was uncomfortable to think that she might have overheard them. ‘There’s someone up there. It must be one of the Kellys.’ She remembered the name of the people who owned the isolated cottage set up on a ridge above the inlet.
Tom didn’t look. ‘No, the Kellys never come up here in August. They think it’s too crowded.’
‘They must have let the place, then.’ The woman had moved out of sight now.
‘If they have, it’s the first time in living memory,’ Tom said coldly, as if it was a matter of importance.
Leonie bent her head. After a minute she scrambled away from him up the ledges of rock and began the walk back to the beach.
There came a day not so long after the Dolphin crossed the Line when Captain Gunnell ordered the boats down. The look-out had sung out at the sighting of a pair of good whales, a cow and a calf, about a mile to leeward of the ship. It was a bright day with a good sea running and the oarsmen soon brought the boats to the spot where the cow had sounded.
Matthias Plant gave the order to his men to rest easy. At the prow the boat steerer was ready with his harpoon and all was silent as they waited upon the whale.
Of a sudden there came a great boiling of the water to the stem of the boat as she blew, and it seemed but a second after that her great head reared up and Matthias’s boat was caught dead in her eye. Her jaws were open wide but Heggy Burris the boat steerer did not delay an instant in hurling the iron true to the flank, where it lodged fast. Some blood ran from the wound but the beast seemed not to feel it, for all her attention was fixed on the fate of her calf.
Another boat had got the calf fast and it thrashed pathetically enough in the swell, its head dipping beneath the water as its life faded and a great wash of its blood darkened the sea.
The sight launched the mother whale into a transport. Her back arched into a mountain standing proud of the water between the boats and the dying calf. Then Burris was forward with his second iron, thrown as true as the first and the lines made a great run as her flukes went up and beat the water into a torrent of spray, which left the men blinded for an instant.
Matthias shouted, ‘Forward, forward all!’
The line begin to whip out of the tubs and the experienced hands knew for sure she was going away, an ugly whale that might lead them the dance of all their lives.
Then there was a scream that would sound in every man’s dreams until his dying day, as the line fouled and a loop of it caught around the body of Martin the bowman as he bent over his oar.
In an instant he was snatched overboard, gone after her as the whale dived, and his companions were left in the boat staring like stone men at the smoking line about the loggerhead, until William Corder tremblingly cooled it with water from his bailing bucket as Mr Plant had reminded him to do a dozen times.
The whale plunged many fathoms, taking the bowman down with her and boat careening in their wake.
Heggy Burris began shouting like the devil, with his lance at the ready, ‘Pull one, pull all, for here she comes again,’ and they readied themselves to haul on the line as their only chance of seeing Martin again. William bent to the frantic work like the others, giving the sum of his meagre strength to the task.
The whale broke the water not one hundred feet away and every man gave his all to bring the boat round to take her head and head.
It was this turn of direction that slackened the line for a brief moment, so releasing Martin from his terrible noose. He rolled up, to surface like a log, and Matthias roared the order to row to his rescue. The men did not need to be told twice. Even as the craft flew across the width of water the whale went flukes up again and for all the two harpoons lodged deep in her side she was going at an even greater rate than before. The line flew out once more but there was yet enough in the tubs to allow them to reach Martin where he floated and to haul him over the stern and into the boat.
It was a terrible sight.
The line had bitten through coat, shirt and flesh alike, and was near to having cut the poor man clean in two. As it was, his chest was hacked open as if with a butcher’s knife and the rib-bones laid bare. A mess of blood bubbled and welled out – it seemed to William’s horrified eyes more than a man’s veins could hold – and ran into the bottom of the boat to crimson all their feet. The poor fellow gave a cough and his eyelids fluttered, and Heggy Burris cried out, ‘Dear God, he lives.’
But even as the words were spoken Martin’s mouth opened and a groan and a great spout of blackened blood and sea-water spilled out of him together, and he lay still. He lived no longer.
William Corder watched all of this with staring eyes and the back of his hand pressed up to his mouth.
‘Hold hard,’ Matthias bellowed at him. There were other matters to attend to if they were not all to end up in the same way as Martin the bowman. The whale was still running away from them and they were fast being drawn from the other boats in the wake of this leviathan. The boat steerer was calling for the drags to slow her rush, and Matthias saw to it that William and the other two men worked the line regardless of the grim cargo they bore with them.
The whale flew on like an arrow and at such a speed that the water rose up in a wall on either side of the boat. The tubs would soon be empty of line and there was no other boat within reach to bend on with her own lines and help save them, and the fine whale.
William Corder cooled the flying line with water from his bucket, but his face had no more colour than the dead man’s.
At length Matthias had the bitter choice between giving the order to cut the line and thus surrendering whale, whaleline and two harpoons, as well as his bowman, or to risk being dragged under, and losing the boat itself and the lives of five more men. He gave the command, the lines were cut and, freed of her tormentor at last, the vessel wallowed in the swell like a porpoise.
The Dolphin rode three miles off to their stern. It was a bitter hard row back to her, with Martin lying cut almost in half at their feet. The sight of William Corder’s face touched some chord of pity buried deep in Matthias Plant’s hardened heart and to hide it the mate let out a great bluster of rage. He cursed the boy squarely for his softness, so that William bowed his head over
