Forbidden (12 page)

I sensed Mrs. Stuart standing very still.

“I do not believe you to be weak. I can only assure you that if I could tell you more, I would. But I am forbidden.”

“Forbidden!” I looked at Mrs. Stuart, then back at Eli. “There is that word again! Are you authorized by law in some way, some secret business?”

I waited for an answer.

His grandmother seated herself on the edge of a chair. I saw how tightly she gripped the armrests.

“I am authorized. But not by law,” Eli said after a long pause.

“Another enigma,” I said sourly. It was good to be angry with him. The anger concealed my other, outrageous feelings.

“I must go.”

And that was all he said before he went out, coatless, into the fury of the night.

“I will make us both a hot drink,” Mrs. Stuart said. Her kindness almost set me to weeping. It was as though she had seen through my rage to the pain inside.

“Do not be grieving, bairn,” she whispered. “He follows the rules given to him. He cannot show affection for you, or even friendship.”

I stared at her. “Am I to suppose he is forbidden in that respect also? He is forbidden to confide in me? He is forbidden to show affection for me. If indeed he has affection.”

“Oh, he has,” Mrs. Stuart said. “It is hard for him, Josie.”

I stood, trembling. “Is he a priest? A man of the cloth?”

“No.”

Another thought came. “Is he already wedded?”

“No, not that either. You must take my word, Josie.”

“Is it forbidden to me to ask you questions?”

“No. But realize I may not have the answers you seek. Or I may decline to answer.”

I nodded. “The people here cannot abide him. Why do they not banish him from Brindle? I’m told they have tried to kill him. There is something about a ‘three.’” I paused.

“They have tried three times,” his grandmother said. “But they are racked with superstition.
The Decree of Three.
Woe to those who pay no heed.
The old Brindle superstition they hold to be true. Try three times to kill, and if you do not succeed, it is not sanctioned. His spirit is not ready to leave his body.”

I shook my head. “They believe that?”

“Oh, yes. Francis Mulderry scoffed and tried a fourth time. He pushed Eli over Carver’s Cliff. But Eli came to a stop in a whin brush and was unhurt.”

“And the man? Francis Mulderry?”

“The cliff crumbled, and he crumbled with it. He broke his neck.”

Mrs. Stuart’s tone was matter-of-fact, and all the time she spoke, she busied herself, stoking the fire, filling a kettle with water, and setting it on the stove.

A coldness moved across me. “But you do not give the saying credence?” I whispered.

“Perhaps I do. Old Brody Leech shot at Eli with a pistol. It misfired. And when he turned up the muzzle to examine it, it went off and shot him in the face. And then of course there was the drowning.”

“They tried to drown him?”

“Oh, yes. It is all enough to make the superstitious believe the Decree of Three. And if ’tis true, my thanks to it, as Eli is still with us.” She came briskly across to where I sat. “I am not as superstitious as they, but I believe there are things in life unknown to us. I’ve experienced them myself. Now, let me have a look at your foot.”

“It is better, thank you. Scarcely paining me at all.”

She took my dirty, wet foot in her hands and examined it.

“Indeed, you are right. It is well healed. You are a healthy girl.”

“And you are a magician,” I said. “Thank you. May I ask about Eli’s parents? Was it from the influenza? My dear mother and father took ill one week and died the next. Was it . . . ?”

“You must ask Eli,” she muttered. “I have already said too much.”

I could not abide my thoughts. “Please tell me,” I implored. “Do not make it another mystery. You
have
said too much, and now I am left to wonder.”

She stood for a moment, silent, then went to the fire, emptied water from the kettle on the hob into a shallow pan, and carried it and a flannel to the table. She was not prepared to tell me more. “You will want to wash,” she said. “I will find you dry clothes. Then we will see you to bed. Eli will not be back till morning.”

I fought down a rush of disappointment. “It is odd to me that he must go again to watch something that troubles him so much.”

“Because he is a recorder,” she said.

Before I could remark on that, she said briskly, “You shall have my bed. I will make myself comfortable on the settle by the fire.”

So Eli was a recorder! I had much to think about. I took a deep breath. “If he is not to be back, perhaps I could have
his
bed.” I was immediately abashed by my quick suggestion and by the way my heart trembled at the thought.

“No. Even I may not go in his room,” she said.

“I suppose it is forbidden,” I said.

“Yes.”

I began to undo the buttons on my dress and waited while she rearranged my wet shawl and Eli’s coat closer to the fire.

“I will leave you to your privacy.”

I washed my hands and face and had finished drying my feet and legs when she returned.

“Thank you for allowing me to stay,” I told her. “And for all your consideration. But I must insist that you have your own bed and allow me to take the settle. I will be warm and comfortable.”

She did not protest but took the bellows to the fire, flaring up a quick blaze, then went again and brought a nightgown of her own, a woolen coverlet, and a patchwork quilt. I stared at the quilt.

“I made it,” she said. “Do not be uneasy. Nothing here has come from broken ships or dead men. The squares are from garments Eli wore as a child. He had no more need of them.”

I ran my hand across the patches of color—red, green, blue as his eyes—and imagined him on the beach gathering shells, searching in tidepools.

I turned my eyes away from her for fear she could read my face as she had done once before, and perhaps she did, because she suddenly folded her arms around me.

“Child, child,” she whispered, and when I looked at her, I saw her sadness. “I wish that it were not so.”

She brought me a cup of warm milk and a slice of buttered oat cake, waited while I finished and till I lay down on the settle. Tucked me in the way my mother used to do.

“Can you sleep, Josie?” she whispered, and I nodded, though sleep was far from me. She was not to know. “I am nearby,” she said. “If you call out, I will hear.” She lowered the lantern light so there was only the faint glow from it and the brightness of the fire.

“Good night,” she whispered.

I lay in the sparsely furnished room. No relics of shipwrecks. Just handmade furniture, an old-fashioned clock that ticked reassuringly on the mantel, the jars of her potions lined tidily on the table. On a coat tree hung a few garments and a knitted cap.

I lay, listening to the storm battering the house, seeing again in my mind the beach, the bodies rolling in on the giant waves, and I hugged the quilt around me for comfort. It was a part of Eli’s past. The only part I had of him. Tomorrow, tomorrow I would start back to Edinburgh and put as much distance between me and this vile place as I could. Tomorrow there would be no more Eli. If he had just shown me by a glance or a word that he wanted me to stay longer, I would have. No, I couldn’t have. But I would have begged him to come with me. I would have thrown myself upon him.
Stop it!
I told myself.
I will forget him. I have known him for so little time. He is almost a stranger.
But I lied. I knew I would never forget him, that I would yearn for him always.

In the fireplace, the turf shifted, sending up dying sparks. It was growing cold, with the wind searching and finding cracks to smother the heat. There were turf bricks stacked by the fire. I arose from the settle and put four of them on the embers.

Over there, behind the back wall that was within my reach, was Eli’s room. I stared at the wall, as if by staring I could see through it. He would not return till morning.

He was a recorder, his grandmother had said. What was he recording? I believed it to be the evil that was happening in Brindle Point. Who was it for? The law? Ship owners who wanted revenge or recompense? Or was he on a quest to find the name of someone who had been killed?

His room might hold the answer. If I knew that, I would know him better.

Entering his room was forbidden. But no one had said it was forbidden to me. I drew a deep breath. I would go in.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

I
TOOK MY SHAWL
from the chair by the fire, then put it back and chose Eli’s coat in its stead. It was dry and warm and rough to the touch, long enough on me to reach below my knees. It smelled of the sea and the sun. The lantern, dimmed, was on a hook by the table. I lifted it down and carried it with me as I left the house.

Cold hit me and the wind slapped me back against the door. Just in time, I shielded the flame.

Far out in the blackness that was the sea, the sinking ship looked smaller, the fishing boats deadly toys rising and falling below it. I supposed this would continue till there was nothing left of the ship save its skeleton.

“God help any lives that are still left.”

Somewhere, in the shadows, Eli was watching, recording. I wished I knew more. His room might hold the answer.

My lantern gave only a glimmer of light, the globe almost obscured by my outspread hand. “Don’t snuff out, don’t snuff out.”

I stopped, listening to the ragged beat of my heart.

“Curiosity is only prying by another name,” my father had told me more than once. “Someday it will lead you where you should not go.” This could be a Pandora’s box that was said to hold all the evils of the world. If I opened it, would I let the evils escape? Would I ever get them in again?

I shook my head. This was Eli’s room, that was all. And he was not evil. I told myself that entering was more than curiosity. This was need, a need to further understand the secret person who had come to mean so much to me.

I had another moment of misgiving as I tried the door handle. What if it was locked? It was not. None of the Brindle inhabitants would try to do him harm or dare intrude on where he lived. In their superstitious minds was ever the Decree of Three.

For better or for worse, I was there, inside Eli’s private place with the door closed tight behind me.

I wound up the wick of the lantern and held it high, then stood perplexed, turning my head this way and that.

There was nothing but a table made of two boards laid across two half barrels. A wooden chair. Nothing else? There must be.

I looked around for another door that would lead into a second room. There was none. Where was his bed? His clothes?

On the desk was a book with a red leather cover and a quill standing upright in an ink pot.

That was all. This then was where he inscribed the murderous doings on Brindle Point. To look in it would indeed be prying. I did not hesitate but set the lantern on the desk and opened it.

It was not a story. On the first page was a long list of names.

I sat on the chair and read them one by one.

The first was Caleb Ferguson. My uncle.

Below that, Minnie Ferguson. My aunt.

As I trailed my finger down the long list, names that I now knew jumped out at me.

Esmeralda Davies. The proprietress of Jackdaws.

Clifton McIntyre, the mayor of Brindle.

Mrs. Kitteridge, Daphne’s mother. She of the terrifying rings. No Daphne recorded.

Name after name after name.

My trembling fingers turned the page. Another list; all of those names save two were unfamiliar. I knew two. The names of a man and a woman I had never met, but I recognized them immediately I read Eli’s words.

Miranda Lee Stuart, 1804 . . . my mother.

Dermott Stuart, 1804 . . . my father. Their ketch, the
Windhover,
lured onto the rocks by false lights.

I was trembling, and the two names seemed to slide away from the page, come back and slide again so that I had to wait and breathe deeply.

This was how his parents had died. Three years since. Poor Eli! Where was he when they drowned? In his grandmother’s house? Outside, despairing, watching? Or in some other place, not knowing that he had lost them both?

I forced myself to read on.

Sergio Costello, 1804 . . . on board the
Prudence.
Unknown, 1804. The bell buoy warning muffled by the inhabitants of Brindle Point.

Unknowns . . . off the
Prudence.

Silas McClintock, 1805 . . . off the
Liverpool Lass.

Charles Prufrock, aged ten, 1805, off the
Liverpool Lass.
Maria Prufrock, mother.

On and on. Many Unknowns.

I bade myself to keep reading. Next, in large letters:

Boniface,
1806, eighteen. All drowned. All unknown.

Boniface.
This ship’s name was on the trunk in Jackdaws and on my aunt’s serviette ring.

The
Sea Urchin.

I turned the page. There were more. Halfway down the page, the list stopped. But I felt sure it would start again and the date would be 1807. Tonight Eli was keeping watch. He was making a record of the dead. And of the ones responsible for those deaths. I sat, the wind rattling the walls, threatening to come in and take me. He had hinted that those murderers would somehow be punished. Was he himself going to tend to that? To kill them to avenge the dead? To punish them for the deaths of his parents?

I drew his coat tight around me. It was cold, cold, cold. Eli did not feel the cold. I tried to calm myself and think. What if he were a newsman, writing a story for the
Edinburgh Evening Courant,
the paper my father had read? Or even the
Caledonian Mercury,
to expose this horror? Oh, I hoped that was what it was.