Billie's Kiss (4 page)

‘He's waiting for his cousin and the boys in uniform,' Billie said. And then she burst into tears. ‘The water looks so cold,' she sobbed. ‘And where are the trees?'

Henry tried to make her raise her face. He pressed her shoulders softly back against the timber wall, then touched her chin. ‘Love?' he said. ‘My poor girl.' He cleared a tear away to kiss her gently under one eye.

Billie turned her head so that their lips brushed. Henry started back, a fraction of an inch, broke contact. They exhaled together, and their breath mingled and encased their faces, warm and moist like summer in the south. Henry stared at her, his face pale and shining, then moved nearer again. He touched his mouth to hers, parted his lips, and something passed from his mouth to hers.

The mooring lines were made fast. Billie heard – registered hearing – an order about the gangplank. She pulled away from her brother-in-law, shoved him aside, and swarmed up the ladder. She stepped once on her own hem, fell into the opened hatch cover, and heard stitches part. Henry caught her ankle. At his touch Billie felt a crippling spasm somewhere inside her. She jerked her foot free and stumbled onto the deck, her legs clumsy, the space between them filled as if something there had swollen to twice its normal size.

The cold wind burned her face.

Billie plunged through the four gentlemen. One of the
cadets staggered, his cap fell and rolled on its brim. A hand caught at her arm – Hesketh, incensed, and implacable. She threw her whole weight back to break his grip, and fell on her hip, sucked air and a whiff of the tar between the timbers on the deck, then sprang up again and ran.

She made for the gangplank, which two seamen at the rail were still guiding into place. The plank's far end was yet clear of the stones, a foot both ways, a foot beyond, a foot above. Billie wanted to get off the ship. She wanted to get off the shore, too, Henry's ‘home', a town without trees or fences. She wanted to jump as if the ship and shore were both stepping-stones with some firmer place beyond them, some viable future. Billie vaulted up between the men, then past them. Her feet came down neatly in the centre of the
gangplank
– and the men dropped it. For a second it hung on its hinges as the
Gustav
Edda
edged by stately inches toward the pier, then Billie leapt again, the gangplank depressed and tilted, a hinge broke, and the plank's end jammed against the lip of the stone pier. The whole thing splintered. But it was behind Billie already, the plank, the shouting men – the stone was only inches under her feet. She gathered herself to land and to run some more.

Then, instead of arriving, touching down, or being snatched back, Billie felt a hard blow. Some force shoved at her whole body. Her hair flew in front of her face, her legs jerked wide, and she flipped over, flew forward, eyes wide-open. She saw the pier, its slabs of green-grey stone abruptly beneath her head. She glimpsed splinters of white-painted wood, pieces of the gangplank, passing under her inverted crown, pushed across the stone faster than she'd ever seen thrown daisies sucked under the weir at Crickhowell. Then she saw rope webbing and jute-covered bales beneath her, and she put out her arms and fell into them.

BILLIE LIFTED her face from the pallet of musty hemp. Her left ear was ringing, but into her right ear rushed the sound of the sea. The sea was filling her head, and was screaming like steel on stone. Billie looked back, and saw the funnel of the ship, its black barrel trained right at her. It spat out a cloud of smoke and burning embers. She felt two dozen light touches, then lancing pain. She scrambled up – she'd lost a shoe – shook her hair and clothes, shook off the coals before they caught. She couldn't walk straight, but crawled and clambered out of the smoke.

The next thing Billie saw was a woman in a red cap, her mouth stretched wide. The woman was standing, shouting, but – Billie thought – not putting out much sound. The woman was looking at the bulk of an overturned carriage, two horses down and struggling in tangled harness. They were squealing with pain and fright. The noise was appalling. But it was worse seaward. Billie watched as the
Gustav
Edda
's stack impacted on the pier and collapsed. It unrolled like a collar that had popped its stud, then it was dragged out of sight. A cloud of steam came up, ragged and dissolving fast in the wind, a kind of quick smoke. Through the steam Billie glimpsed an impossibility – the ship drifting backward from the wharf propelled by the water boiling in its stack. She saw a mooring line snap at the pier and recoil to flick a figure off the perpendicular starboard deck. The port deck was underwater, the ship rolling over at its berth, water boiling around it and flooded with jets of fire. There were people in the sea. And there were people hoisting themselves over the starboard rail and onto the gleaming side of the ship. Billie watched as two seamen clambered, slithering, toward the bow, and then slid into the sea and struck away from the rolling hull as fast as they were able to swim. Fishermen were running to their boats, but these were on the harbour side of the pier. The pier was solid stone and couldn't be passed under.

There was a group of men on the ship's flank. They
struggled to keep their hold on the steel, but the ship was still rolling. The man in the astrakhan coat, Mr Hesketh, turned against the slope and pushed the two boys up it before him. Their feet made catches in the smooth slick of water running on the hull. He paused, straddled the keel, and put a hand back to his servant. Shouts rose above the howling of steel and a horrid roar of water filling the ship – a roar that rose in tone as water displaced air. The
Gustav
Edda
shuddered. It shook Hesketh's servant off into the water and then began to roll, serenely at first, then with a sudden rush, down upon him. Hesketh, still dry in his beautiful coat, leaned into the roll, after his man, for only a moment, looked into the churning sea as his man was ploughed under it, then flung himself the other way, tumbling down the far slope of the hull even as it was reversing its aspect. Billie didn't see where he landed. She couldn't see Henry at all. She just watched as the ship spun right-way up for a moment, its deck swamped and white water rushing out of its galley and wheelhouse. It seesawed briefly, then plunged into a roll again and pushed its way down into the sea, with an awful muffled roar, giving up air at every aperture, air whitening the water, and steam whitening the air.

The small boats that had rounded the long pier made quickly for the spot, and the quickest had to stand off out of the suction and explosions of flotsam. They circled, and men with gaffs pulled people from the water, some bodies lively, and some limp. There was a crowd on the wharf. No one seemed to know who was in charge, but things began to happen, things that looked like order and action, succour and good. Billie stood and stared. Something pulled at her neck and hair – blood, drying already. Her unshod foot was very cold. She limped to the pier's edge and looked down at the boiling sea. There was less air to escape now, and the water was slowly coming clear. The black side of the ship was perhaps only ten feet under. It was still alive, exhaling.

Billie waited for something else to come up.

Then someone clasped her and drew her back, a woman whose hands smelled of fresh herring, and who wrapped Billie in her own harsh woven wool shawl, and gargled at her soothingly in an unknown language. Other women came to help, and they made to lift Billie between them. Billie tried to free herself. She said her sister's name. Then that name was the only thing in her universe – her whole life collapsed into her cry – it was all she could recognise. ‘
Capital
E
,'
Edith
had
said
,
‘
is
always
easy
to
recognise
.
It
looks
like
the
head
of
a
garden
rake
.'
And
she
wrote
,
on
Billie
'
s
slate:
‘
Edith
.'

‘Edith!' Billie screamed. ‘Edith!
Edith!
'

2

Stolnsay

M
URDO HESKETH wasn't capable. They skinned him before lifting him. They left his sodden coat like a skin in the bottom of the boat and carried him into the shelter of some wool bales, out of the wind. There weren't enough blankets, although even from the shelter, and with only one ear, Murdo thought he could hear a sound very like stones pouring down a wooden sluice – people in pattens hurrying down the stone streets of Stolnsay to the harbour to help. A herring-boat man at Murdo's side used his knife to slit a wool bale open, then pulled greasy fleeces out to tuck around Murdo and Rixon, his cousin's son. The man worked tenderly and, despite the cold, Murdo felt himself catch fire, a half-drowned man in a nest of fleece like a coal in dry moss. Kindness often enraged him. But this was an impartial kindness, it was purely circumstantial.

Murdo couldn't move his jaw or hold the cup they offered him. Young Rixon Hallow was better off, shivering hugely, slopping his tea, but able to speak. He said that his friend Elov had come ashore in the herring boat with him and was alive. He said it several times, but, ‘Where is he?'

A woman with bare forearms glistening with fish scales was trying to get tea into Murdo's mouth. Murdo realised that he was reading Rixon's lips and that the rattling of pattens on cobbles had blended into a high-pitched squeal in his one good ear. He pushed the mug aside and demanded that the woman help him up. She and Rixon reared back.
Murdo was shouting. The woman compressed her lips, but did as he asked. Rixon, mistaking Murdo's intentions, stood too. The boy probably imagined Murdo meant to find Elov Jansen.

The girl with the beautiful hair had leapt from ship to shore only a second before the explosion. She'd blundered past them, white with fear, picked up her skirts, and jumped. Murdo tried to catch her – because, in careering past, she'd winded him, shoved her sharp, insolent elbow into his ribs. He had staggered, snatched at her, then watched her do
something
wild as if desperate to escape great danger. Then there was a thud, and the deck twitched and rose. It was an explosion in the hold of the ship, on the side against the pier. Murdo had felt hot air push his face and saw it lift the sailors who had been fumbling after the unhinged, overburdened gangplank. It blew them over backward with bloodied faces. Rixon's cap flew off, then the deck began to tilt down toward the large hewn stones of the pier.

Murdo, half-deaf, his strength broken by shuddering, grabbed the arm of a passing man. He asked – shouted – ‘Where is the girl? The one who jumped?'

The man shook his head.

Rixon peeled off – he'd seen Elov. His young face quivered, smiled, then collapsed. Still susceptible to reprieve, the boy burst into tears and cast himself at his friend. The
bloody-nosed
cadets squeezed each other till water started out of the thick cloth of their uniforms. Murdo trudged on. He yelled his question, till finally, to his great relief, he came on Rory Skilling, who was on his knees by a half-drowned sailor. Rory Skilling worked for Lord Hallowhulme but was under Murdo's management. Rory sprang up smartly to hear what his manager wanted. He listened, his neck braced with his hand, and made a few timid dampening signs until Murdo dropped his voice. ‘I can't hear myself,' Murdo said, deafly. His ears popped and whistled.

‘Can you hear me?' Rory asked, sounding like someone whose head is buried in honey.

Murdo nodded. He said, ‘Find her. Keep her.'

‘I have to
know
her, Mr Hesketh,' Rory said. Murdo caught it the second time. He told Rory, ‘She's young. She has red hair. Or pink – more pink. You will know her by her hair.'

Rory Skilling left Murdo, who hunkered down on a salt barrel and dropped his face into his hands.

He saw again his servant's alarmed face, saw the moment in which Ian Betler realised that his efforts to climb were outweighed by the downward progress of the ship. Murdo saw the feeble flurry of Ian's arms, like a kitten tumbling off the edge of a chair, its claws failing to find an anchorage, muscle nothing against momentum. Murdo saw alarm turn to horror, and then saw the familiar figure churned under the hull, caught between the rollers of ship and sea. Ian's hands went last, patting and paddling helplessly at the slick steel plates. For an instant Murdo had leaned out into this latest loss, hovered above it. Then he threw himself back over the keel and fell, scrambled, finally thrust himself free. He saved himself.

Somewhere nearby, and inaudible to him now, the boys, Rixon and Elov, were probably still sobbing and swapping stories, shocked, appalled, grateful – and all Murdo could feel was a kind of disappointment, as though he'd missed an opportunity, or failed a test. It made him queasy. It made him want to shed his cold, deaf, bruised self as he'd shed the coat. But he was curious, too – if this savage suspicion could be called curiosity. His consolation would be to discover
why
that girl jumped. Her. His culprit.

Murdo was suddenly fallen upon and pummelled by his big, clumsy cousin, whom he hadn't heard coming. ‘Murdo! My dear fellow, are you all right?' James Hallow, Lord Hallowhulme, was shouting. He was excited. He pawed Murdo, all the time issuing orders, making suggestions, giving
advice to the people crowded around him. They were mostly men from the castle, all looking eager, as eager as hounds looking at the man with the horn, the master of the hunt. Hallowhulme
managed
Murdo to his feet, supported him, his big arm clasped across his cousin's back. As he propelled his cousin along the pier, Hallowhulme continued to check and palpate and stroke Murdo's neck and face and chest and stomach, saying, over and over, ‘Not hurt? Not hurt at all?'

‘No. I'm not hurt at all,' Murdo said, too loud, and saw James wince. ‘I want to question that girl.'

James's meaty, pleading face formed one of its most
characteristic
expressions – he looked at Murdo as if his cousin were an apparition, an unexplained phenomenon, and somehow as productive of indignation as of surprise. ‘
Girl
?'

Murdo explained. He mentioned her name.

James Hallow's cheeks and forehead suffused with blood – he flushed as though humiliated. ‘Good God!' he said. ‘My cataloguer! He wasn't supposed to be on the
Gustav
Edda
.'

‘The girl is to blame,' Murdo said; then, with some effort, ‘I suspect.'

‘Are you quite sure?' Lord Hallowhulme was frowning mightily. He looked like a tot straining on a chamber pot – part pained, part delighted. ‘Surely not. Surely it was the boiler. Some fault with the boiler.'

‘No.' Murdo was stubborn. His rage was stubborn. He shrugged off the supporting arm. ‘Why did she jump if she wasn't to blame?' He felt stifled, felt the good air drain away from his thinking. Air, or red blood. He was sick of being shown concern. He couldn't feel any pain, only violent impatience. Around him and Hallowhulme lay figures in clothes dark with seawater and wrapped in blankets. Some were sitting, some supine. A stretcher went by with a sailor on it, up on one elbow and cradling his other arm. There were shapes motionless under dirty sailcloth. Others were lying with men at work on them, lifting their arms up and
over, up and over, as though the rescuers were teaching the dead to row themselves across that final river. Murdo saw that boats continued to patrol the stretch of water above the wreck, which was still simmering in escaping air. The scene began to shrink, then faded to a red-shot darkness. Murdo hoped no one would catch him and, as he fainted, he thought he heard or felt his cousin abruptly stop fussing and take a step back. Murdo went down in a heap on the stones.

HE CAME to in his own bed. James's wife, Clara, was by him, sitting in a straight-backed chair several feet away. Beyond Clara her maid, Jenny, stooped over a table and tray, conjuring steam in a bowl. Jenny was a lady's maid but had, on this extraordinary occasion, deigned to descend to
dispensing
beef-tea.

The curtain was open, and Murdo could see an odd red radiance out on the pier.

Clara got up and came to the side of his bed, but she didn't kneel, or even incline a little his way. ‘Can you hear me?' she said.

Murdo could, but shook his head. He could postpone everything until daylight, until he was strong enough to get up. If no one told him what had been done in his absence – his stupor – who had taken charge, for instance, then he'd be able to pursue his own investigations. In the morning.

However, Clara seemed not to believe him, and kept on talking. She said that it had grown dark too soon. There were seven still unaccounted for, three from the ‘black gang' – stokers – and four passengers. James had sent to the mainland for divers. Some of the island men had been down in the dark with a line and air hose, without any luck. Clara paused, said again, ‘Can you hear me?' Then she called Jenny over, with the beef-tea. It was Jenny who got Murdo upright. Clara rearranged his pillows. But then Jenny disobligingly handed her mistress the bowl and Clara had to sit and assist Murdo
at getting it to his lips. Clara told him his coat had followed him to the castle. It was hung up in the drying room, and already looked like a weeks-old seal carcass. ‘And we had to cut your gloves off. They shrank.'

His valise and two of his best suits and shirts and shoes were all in the submerged hold of the
Gustav
Edda
,
and his watch was on the table by the bed, case open, cogs stilled.

Clara said, about his clothes, that she imagined it all represented quite an investment of time and money. She asked Jenny to bring her brush case (his was gone). ‘One less thing for you to manage tomorrow by yourself.'

Jenny, who was at the door already, started and stared and blinked at Clara's latest remarks – her mistress rubbing salt in her cousin's wounds. Then Jenny let herself out, the door only opening wide enough to let her skirts past, and nearly closing on their hem.

Murdo pushed the bowl away from him.

‘Enough?' Clara said. Then, ‘Can you hear me, Murdo?'

‘Yes,' Murdo said.

‘Rixon told me that it was his impression that his father found and fussed over you before even looking for him.' Clara waited, then asked, ‘Since when have you been such a favourite?'

IN THE morning no one came to open Murdo's curtains, came carrying a hot kettle to take the chill off the water in the washbasin. Or, rather, Ian didn't come.

For some minutes Murdo lay in the ruddy gloom – there was sun coming through a crack in his red brocade curtains. He couldn't hear whether the house was up; his ears still buzzed and fluttered. But he supposed that it
was
up, and he felt forgotten. He had been only Ian Betler's business. Now he was no one's business.

Murdo kicked off his covers and thrashed out of bed like a child in the throes of a tantrum. He found himself on the
rug in the middle of the bedroom floor, his muscles pulled, and cramping. Even his bones seemed bruised. His fingertips were still bloodless, yellow-white, and when he put them in the basin to splash his face he found that the overnight water felt warm. He dressed himself, shook scenting sprigs of thyme out of a good cotton shirt, wrestled his shoes off the shoe tree, and sat on the edge of his bed to put them on. It took him five minutes to brush the knots out of his hair, and he found only a quarter inch of macassar in the bottle on his bureau. The better stuff – French – was in the harbour. Murdo darkened and slicked his hair – which resisted, as usual.

Breakfast was in the dining room by Clara's small conservatory. Past the begonias in their hanging baskets was a view of the black, wet tree trunks of Lady Hallowhulme Park. The sun had gone now, and the air was full of rain that the islanders, more droll than optimistic, persisted in calling ‘mist'.

On his cousin's appearance James Hallow got up from his place, wiped his beard thoroughly with his napkin, and came around the table. ‘We hadn't expected to see you up so soon,' he said. He took Murdo by the elbow and showed him to his chair, drew it out, and pushed it in against the back of Murdo's knees so that he sat rather abruptly. The butler, posted by the sideboard and the chafing dishes, made a few awkward and aborted movements, trying to make James feel his presence, and his
own
place. Lord Hallowhulme paused beside the butler and, without meeting his eye, patted the man several times, squarely, his big fingers drumming on starched shirtfront.
Stay
put
.
James took up a plate and began to displace covers and spoon out scrambled eggs, sausage, blood pudding, and kedgeree. He heaped the plate high, then laid it before Murdo quietly, without a flourish. At least he allowed Murdo to deal with his own napkin.

During this performance everyone at the table was silent, but once James was back in his own chair he resumed
speaking. He was telling his son's friend, Elov Jansen, about his kippering houses down at Southport. How far forward the construction was. ‘I'll show you the plans after breakfast, shall I? There's a new pier, jetty, and half a dozen houses for my managers. While you're here we must get up a party to Southport. Overland, so you can appreciate some of the fine Palaeolithic sites between here and there.'