up, up into the tissue of the lung. Her arm, her whole body twitched violently with the anticipated thrust, but she could not make it come. Instead, she saw the body of poor Martin the bowman. He lay in the bottom of the whaleboat, his clothing ripped from him and his chest tom open by the line. She saw the bluish-white splintered ruin of his rib-cage and the crimson pulp within that pulsed with the dying rhythm of his heart. It was an image that still visited her dreams. At the same time she heard the steady voice of good Matthias Plant. His fatherly kindness was a long time ago, but it was almost the last she had known.
The hand that held the knife hung paralysed at her side.
Robert Hanner gathered up the logs and all unknowing turned back to his family fireside.
She left the Captain’s House and the headland, and carried her bag down to the silent harbour.
Moored to one of the jetty posts she found a dory and a stout pair of oars stowed within it. Her one thought was to remove herself, to retreat like a nocturnal animal beyond the reach of light and humanity. She unhitched the boat and bent to the oars. After the weight and speed of the whaleboat the little craft seemed no more substantial than an eggshell as she drove it through the swell.
Sarah rowed herself across the bay and out where the current ran between the island and the rocky promontory that jutted from the headland. Pittsharbor town nestled safely in its hollow, as far out of her reach as the moon.
Her first thought had been to row on to the horizon, until either weariness or the waves extinguished her. But some small flame of self-preservation still burned in Sarah, and the flicker of it made her turn her practised oar so that the dory drew broadside to the island and the shoreline that faced the open sea. She paddled through the surf and the prow of the boat grated on the shingle. With strength that she did not know she possessed she hauled it up out of reach of the greedy tide.
Above the beach she climbed upwards through the pucker-brush. The wind was rising and the first raindrops needled her face.
There was a shelter at the crest of the first ridge. She almost fell against the primitive structure of wood and rough stone, and the door creaked open at her touch. Inside nothing was visible in the intense blackness, but it was at least a protection from the rising storm. She reached out and followed the line of the wall with her chilled hand until she found the cobwebbed corner. She sank down on to her haunches, then to the bare earth floor. Out of her soaked bag she took a shawl and wrapped it around her shoulders. Only then did she allow her head to sink on to her knees and the hopeless tears to run out of her eyes.
The wind rose to a shriek, and rain and salt spray battered the walls of the hut. The storm raged all through the night and into the next day.
When the morning light began to thin the gloom Sarah was able to look around her. The few articles left inside the shelter were instantly familiar. There was a long-handled spade whose once-sharp blade was now rusty with disuse and a wooden bucket. The spade would have been used for severing the tendons of a whale’s flukes, and for cutting deep incisions in the blubber by which the creature could be roped and towed back to the whaling ship for dismemberment, and the bucket was just the same as the one she had used for bailing sea water at Matthias’s shouted command. From a peg on the wall looped a coil of whale line and on a shelf above it stood a brave row of pewter tankards.
The shelter into which she had stumbled was a whalers’ refuge, a rough tavern for the crews of the small boats seeking to capture those whales which came close in to the shore. Their business must have been a disappointment because the place had been abandoned. But the irony at having fetched up in such a resort made Sarah’s mouth twist in a bitter smile.
She waited out the daylight in the ruined tavern, venturing out into the wind-tossed open only once, to drink a mouthful of water from a brackish spring and gather a stained handful of wild berries to eat.
When night fell once more the wind dropped at last, but huge seas still battered the growling shingle. Sarah knew there could be no waiting for the waves to subside; she must row back to the mainland and do the deed that was waiting for her. She slipped through the trees and over the rocks to the beach, where the dory lay waiting for her. No fishermen from Pittsharbor had put to sea today.
Somehow she found the strength to propel the boat through the swell and spume to the bay shore. Drenched to the skin and light-headed with thirst and hunger she staggered across the shingle and climbed the rocks of the bluff. The soft lamplight shone from the windows of Robert and Charlotte Hanner’s house.
Tonight she lacked even the cunning to try to conceal herself. She dragged herself to the nearest window and pressed her numb face to it.
A young woman sat within, dark-haired and dark-browed, with her head bowed in tender contemplation of the infant in her lap. In the background her husband busied himself with some small domestic business. The three of them were bathed in light and warmth, with the baby helpless and soft-limbed at the centre of the tableau.
Sarah’s mouth stretched wide in a silent howl. She knew she could not murder Robert Hanner. The determination she had nourished melted away like icicles in May and left her with nothing. The emptiness in her heart was worse than hatred; it was resignation and death itself.
The young wife looked up and saw the face at the window. Her scream as she snatched the child to her breast was so shrill that its echoes cut through the boiling of the waves and silenced them. Sarah turned and ran from the world for the last time.
She took the dory out once more and rowed through the wicked surf to the island. She waded the last few steps with the undertow ravenous at her legs and fell in exhaustion on to the bay shore. The boat tossed in the breakers and was carried away from her.
Somehow Sarah found her way over the island’s crest to her last shelter. She spent one more long night huddled in the tavern corner and when the dirty light of morning crept around her once again she stood upright. She wrote some lines on a piece of paper from her pocketbook and printed the man’s name on the folded sheet, before tucking it securely into her clothing. Then she picked up her bag with the few belongings and the knife that had lain on the earth floor beside her. She carried both of them down to the shore and dropped the bag into the sea. It wallowed at her feet for a moment, a waterlogged torso, then the current sucked it away. The knife she threw after it. It made a cold arc as it flew through the air.
She went slowly back to the whalers’ hut and took the line down from its peg. Whaleline was both strong and light, the finest exemplar of the ropemaker’s art. The best hemp was impregnated with tar vapour and three strands of seventeen yarns each were woven together, every one of those strands separately tested to sustain a burden of one hundred and twelve pounds. Her own meagre weight would make no impression on such a piece of line.
Above the shelter there was a sturdy oak tree with a convenient branch some seven feet from the ground. She climbed into the tree and tied one end of the line to a branch over her head. She lowered the free end and measured the drop with her eye. Then, using the boatman’s hitches that Matthias Plant had taught her aboard the Dolphin, she fashioned the noose.
She did not sit long on her perch with the sea’s merciless chorus loud in her ears. She closed her eyes and dropped into silent space.
They stood at the doorway looking in. Ivy peered past her father’s shoulder, twisting a strand of night-tousled hair across her mouth. May’s bedroom was empty. It smelt unused.
‘I don’t know,’ she muttered
