whispered her thanks. Matthias waited until the last, except for Captain Gunnell.
When it came to his turn to say farewell he took her small hand between both of his great calloused ones. ‘Sarah, if you do find who you are searching for, what do you truly believe will happen?’
‘I will make him marry me.’
‘And if he will not? Or cannot?’
Her wide eyes never wavered. Matthias felt a shiver touch him like the first intimation of a fever. ‘Then I will kill him like a venomous snake.’ Her hand slid from his grasp and she was smiling. ‘Good Matthias, you must not be anxious on my behalf. I am truly grateful for your kindness and I will always be your friend. Goodbye.’
So saying, she kissed his cheek for the last time and turned to Captain Gunnell at the taff-rail.
The men stood together watching as the boat carried her towards the shore.
‘Do you imagine that she will find him?’ Matthias musingly asked.
‘I am certain she will.’
‘And then?’
‘I would not be in that man’s shoes for any money.’
News of the woman who had disguised herself in men’s clothing and sailed on the Dolphin had travelled fast. A crowd of people were gathered on the dock, all waiting to catch a glimpse of her. Sarah stepped out on to dry land, handed up by her boatman, and the press of people immediately closed around her.
She turned once to look back at the old Dolphin. She took off her straw hat and waved it, the black ribbons fluttering on the crowded dock.
That was the last glimpse they had of her.
May yawned and scratched the mosquito bites on her ankle. She liked books and she was quite interested in the sad and gory whaling stories, because of the remote connection with the history of Moon Island, but she couldn’t imagine that Doone would have read much of them by choice. From the plain sections of the diary she knew Doone didn’t exactly have broad literary or historical interests. Maybe Hannah Fennymore had offered to lend her the books and Doone had accepted out of politeness. Perhaps there had been no other suitable book to hand, so Doone had used the Dolphin book as the base for her code.
May flipped idly to the front and scanned the introductory pages that she hadn’t bothered to read before. She learned that the book’s narrative was based on Matthias Plant’s journals. The old whaleman had continued writing his journal for the rest of the Sarah Corder voyage and the three voyages that followed it, until he retired at last in 1848. Finally, in old age he set up home with his wife in the village of Wellfleet on Cape Cod, to be near one of his married daughters. After his death his books and papers were stored with the rest of his keepsakes in a tin trunk, and there they stayed until they were disinterred in 1902 by his grandson.
This young man read the whaling diaries with the utmost fascination and passed them to a college friend who worked as an editor for a New York firm of publishers. So it happened that more than fifty years after they were written, the story told in Matthias’s memoirs was published by Charles Scribner & Sons under the tide Voyages of the Dolphin. When she looked at the front of the book again, May saw that Hannah’s book was the second reprint, dated 1909. Hannah must have owned the book for a long time. Or perhaps, May thought, she had found it on the second-hand shelves of the Bookhouse, Pittsharbor’s only bookshop. Her name was written on the blank first page in blue ink, but there was no date.
‘May?’ She looked up. John was calling her from the foot of the stairs. ‘Are you coming to watch the fireworks?’
May swung her legs off the bed, noticing as she always did the ugly way the flesh quivered inside the loop of her shorts legs. ‘Yeah, okay.’
John and May walked down the Pittsharbor road together. They hadn’t even waited for Ivy to materialise, knowing that she would have her own plans for the evening.
‘It’s a wonderful evening. We’re lucky,’ John said. Darkness was settling over the bluff and the first stars pricked the sky.
May wrestled with what she should say. The image of her father on the sofa with Leonie Beam remained obstinately stuck in her head. It jarred like a misshapen jigsaw piece with other graphic sexual images. A scene from a video she had seen long ago with Ivy. Ivy herself with Lucas. The old people, Elizabeth and Aaron long ago in the Captain’s House. Doone’s numbered words conjuring thick passion out of the pages of an old-fashioned book. They were images she didn’t want to see but they attacked all her senses. Sex was everywhere, roping around everyone but herself.
It was impossible to tell her father any of this. Disgust and shapeless longing possessed her in equal parts. ‘Yes.’
After a moment’s hesitation John asked, ‘Can we talk about the other evening?’
The cuts on her hand were healing. The new tissue puckered and crawled under the antiseptic tape. ‘No.’ She heard how her blank monosyllable disconcerted him. Miserably she added, ‘Can’t we just forget about it? I’d rather we did. Truly.’
‘It’s just…’
‘Please,’ May begged.
Her desperation silenced him. ‘If that’s what you really want,’ John murmured. They walked on to the harbour without speaking.
At the moment of their arrival the first firework exploded overhead in a mushroom of sparks and a cascade of blue and emerald fireballs. The sparks drifted down, turning scarlet until they were blotted out in the sea, and another rocket streaked upwards.
Ivy was in the crowd, with her arm draped around the shoulders of Sam Deevey. She waved when she saw them. Leonie Beam was there too, with Sidonie on her shoulders. The bursting rocket illuminated her profile for an instant and May knew that her father’s eyes stayed on her.
Lucas came out of a group and greeted them. It was clear that he had been drinking. ‘Hi, Maysy. Happy Pittsharbor Day, guys.’
The driftwood fire on the beach facing Moon Island held a core of pure red heat within a cage of branches. Every so often part of the latticework collapsed and a column of sparks went shooting upwards like a tiny echo of the Pittsharbor fireworks. Even now from the direction of the harbour an occasional rocket streaked into the darkness, followed by the peppery explosions of firecrackers. Freelance celebrations were continuing in the town long after the official ones had ended.
Food had been barbecued and eaten around the bonfire by the bluff families and a loose group of guests, mostly friends of the Beam children. Everyone had drunk wine or beer, and a fragile gloss of cordiality slicked over an undercurrent of tension, which seemed to dull the fire and thicken the already stifling air.
In an effort to lighten the atmosphere Marian and Marty had talked too much from opposite sides of the group. Now one of the boys was picking at a guitar and an uneasy calm settled. Figures moved in the firelight, to pick up a bottle of wine or fetch more wood, and an umber glow halved their silhouettes.
Murmurs of conversation threaded the groups; the evening had reached the point where the young people would begin to drift away and the older
