The Dutch Wife (24 page)

“You all right?” It was Will Drummond’s voice.

“Yes,” Rowland said. He blinked till his eyes cleared and he saw he was on a slatted wooden raft with a fringe of rope around it. “But my notebooks are in the cabin.”

“You’re lucky you’re not with them,” said Will.

Eva Sorrentino was lying on the raft too, her eyes closed, her clothes smeared with engine oil. Will Drummond, who had pulled them both aboard, wore no shirt. He had a paddle in his hands.

“Is Eva all right?” Rowland said.

“She’s all right,” Will said. “She’s had an awful shock. She’s better off sleeping for now. Keep an eye out for anyone else.” He began rowing the clumsy float.

Rowland saw that Will’s body was badly scarred by old wounds of some sort. But he had other things to think about. He looked around. The fog, or the steam, or whatever it was already seemed much thinner now. Less than fifty yards away, he could clearly see the
Derevaun
with her prow and her stern in the air, the point of the V well underwater with his cabin and his notes. Debris floated all around—broken timbers, ropes, decking, crates, spars, all shining with oil.

Behind one of the crates, Will had noticed some splashing and he paddled the float in that direction, thinking it might be a survivor. It was, in fact, a zebra, covered in oil. When it saw them, it swam towards the float, its eyes wild with fear. It managed to get its front hooves aboard and tried to heave itself up, almost tipping the raft over with its weight. Will lifted his oar in the air and smashed the zebra on the nose to fend it off. Rowland held on to the raft with one hand and clutched Eva’s arm with the other, for she had begun to slide into the sea. Will kept striking out at the zebra till it gave up its efforts and swam away.

Will nevertheless kept on searching all around the stricken
Derevaun
. But they could see no other signs of life. The two legs of the V were becoming shorter and more upright, the broken ship groaning loudly in its unnatural posture.

“We’d better get away from here now,” Will said at last.

The raft had begun to move slowly away from the ship towards the open sea when a curious thing happened. An oily arm reached up from out of the sea and grabbed the left arm of Eva Sorrentino, which was trailing overboard.

Rowland thought it must be one of the crew, a survivor at last. But the head and shoulders that emerged from the water belonged to one of the apes, its brown eyes looking at them pathetically. Will again used his paddle and slashed at the ape’s head till it began to bleed. The animal released its grip on Eva and splashed away. Three deep scratches marked her arm where she’d been held, but she remained unconscious.

IT WAS ALMOST SUNDOWN
and Will had paddled about a mile from the
Derevaun
when her two extremities finally snapped together like scissors and slid into the depths. Now the raft kept floating in a westerly direction, only partly helped by the paddle. As darkness fell, Will stopped paddling entirely and nestled beside Eva to keep her or perhaps himself warm, for he had no shirt. Not long after that, from away to the east, they were startled by a great gurgling sound, as though a giant bathtub were draining. For a while after, the air smelled foul. Then it cleared away, and all sounds ceased except for the slap of waves against the raft. There were wisps of fog, but this time it was a cool, northern fog. The water that sometimes lapped over the edges of the raft was as cold as it ought to be, the chill water of a chill northern sea. Reassured, Rowland himself at last fell asleep.

– 11 –

COLD WATER SLAPPED
Rowland Vanderlinden’s face. He spat the salt and the sleep out of his mouth and looked around. The night sky was covered in bruises from its losing battle with the dawn—the sun was peering over the eastern wall of the world. It reminded Rowland of the bloodshot eye of an old Magus he’d once met in a village on the fringes of the desert—the old man used to rub ashes in his eyes to make himself look even more frightening.

Rowland began to shiver, but not at that memory. He was wearing only a shirt and trousers and the sea-breeze was cold. He envied Will and Eva, lying at the other end of the raft, wrapped together like lovers.

Will’s eyes were open. “Can you hear something?” he said quietly.

Rowland listened. “No,” he said.

“Listen again,” said Will.

Rowland listened. Nothing but the slap of the waves against the raft. Then he heard it—a distant, menacing growl. “Oh, no!” he thought. His heart beat faster as he took hold of the paddle, his eyes straining as he searched the water, looking for the source of that ominous sound. Again he heard the growl, coming from the direction the sun hadn’t yet illumined. He heard it again, and again and again, rhythmic and precise. That growl was the sea’s greeting to a sandy shore. “Breakers!” he said.

Eva had opened her eyes now too. She and Will disentangled and they all peered into the gloom. There it was, only a few hundred yards away—the black outline of an island against a horizon of ocean that was already less dark.

“It’s not very big. We’d better make sure we don’t drift by,” said Rowland. He gave Will the paddle. “You steer,” he said and slipped overboard. The cold of the water shocked him for a moment, but he clutched the fringe of rope and kicked out with his stiff legs, propelling the raft ever so slowly towards the shore. He swam this way for ten minutes or more.

Then something thick and hairy, something nightmarish, curled itself round his thighs. His legs scissored wildly in his panic and he tried to scramble aboard. “Will!” he shouted.

Will Drummond hunched over him, the paddle high, ready to strike whatever it was that had him in its grip. Then he put down the paddle. “It’s all right,” he said. “Your legs are tangled in seaweed, that’s all.”

Rowland believed him, for he could now feel his feet touch bottom. The raft lodged against some rocks, where the sea was waist-deep. Will helped Eva overboard and all three of them waded the last fifty yards to the beach and staggered across the sand to some dunes that were in the grip of scraggy bushes. They found a hollow out of the breeze. The sun was higher now and the air was already warming. Cold and wet, they sat down.

A BLACK-AND-WHITE DOG
came leaping into the hollow, saw them, and ran away with a yelp of fear.

Rowland got to his feet, balancing himself against the unaccustomed sway of the land. He looked in the direction the dog had run but could see no farther than the high dunes. “I’ll go have a look,” he said. “Maybe it has an owner.”

Will also tried to get up but sat down again quickly, wincing with pain. He hitched up the right leg of his trousers. There, just below the knee, was a deep cut, six inches long. The knee itself was badly swollen. “I’ll just sit for a while yet,” he said.

Eva spoke for the first time. “It looks bad,” she said. Then she looked at her own left arm and fingered the livid scratches there. “I don’t remember getting these,” she said.

Rowland would have told her how Will defended her from the ape, but he feared she wouldn’t appreciate the way he’d done it. “You two stay here,” he said.

HE SAW THE WHITE STRUCTURE
of a signal light on the first headland. Just fifty yards behind it, on a hill behind the high dunes, was a clapboard cabin, its chimney stack painting little white daubs on the blue morning sky.

As he approached, the black-and-white dog came running towards him, then ran back to the cabin and stood at the door, barking. Its bark was high-pitched and nervous.

Rowland kept advancing, the dog kept barking.

The door of the cabin jerked open.

“Robbie! Quiet!” shouted a stocky little man in rumpled clothes. He wasn’t old but bald with a fringe of black hair and a scraggy grey-black beard. He was shocked at the sight of Rowland standing there, but extremely polite. “A visitor!” he said. “Well, well! Are you all right?”

“I’m not alone,” said Rowland.

– 12 –

HERBERT FROGLICK,
the little bearded man, accompanied Rowland to the beach and helped support Will back to the cabin. It was really just one cluttered room, so getting Will from the door to the bunk required careful navigation between heaps of thick books and scattered papers. Much of the floor space was taken up by a large table covered with charts and pencils and compasses and protractors. Froglick swept a number of papers off the bunk, adding to the debris on the floor.

In all this time, he’d asked no questions, only given directions in a loud voice. When Will was at last deposited on the bunk, the little man went to a wall cabinet full of medicine and took out disinfectant and bandages. He cleansed Will’s leg quite expertly and bound it. He sat Eva on the wooden chair—the only chair—beside the table and disinfected the scratches on her arms. “This island’s called Wreck Bar,” he said at last. “It’s an MMO—a Maritime Meteorological Outpost. I tend to the signal lamp and record the weather and the tidal patterns in this area.”

He now went to the cooking area in the corner and made a pot of coffee and sandwiches of bread and tinned beef. The three survivors ate hungrily. Rowland told him about their voyage, the fog, the strange lifting up and dropping of the ship, the escape on the raft.

Froglick listened with great interest. “Very strange,” he said when Rowland had finished. Then he told them he’d experienced something peculiar the night before too. He’d been walking on the beach with Robbie around seven o’clock, just before sunset. From far out to sea, he’d heard a deep booming sound such as he’d never heard before. Robbie was terrified. A few minutes later Froglick saw a wave bigger than usual sweeping in. To be on the safe side, he retreated to the higher dunes. The wave came and went, and the sea settled down. He went to the beach again and saw that its entire length had been dyed a yellowish colour and that thousands of fish had been cast up, dead or dying. Just as unusual was the smell—a pungent stink. “The next tide washed away almost every trace,” Froglick said. “But that smell was unmistakable—it was sulphur. I believe your ship must have sailed directly over an underwater volcano just as it was erupting. You’ve experienced something very rare in the annals of Meteorology. Yes, you’ve been very fortunate.” He said this with obvious envy.

Rowland wondered what kind of man he was. “How long have you worked here?” he said.

“Seven years,” said Froglick. “A ship brings supplies four times a year.”

Rowland looked around. There were no luxuries in the cabin, and they’d already discovered that the nearby dunes served as a washroom. “You’re a scientific hermit,” he said.

Froglick seemed quite flattered. “I’m very happy here,” he said. “But you won’t need to concern yourselves about being here too long. As a matter of fact, the supply ship’s due to arrive here tomorrow. They’ll take you to Halifax.”

WHEN NIGHT FELL,
Froglick lit an oil lamp that hung from the ceiling and again disinfected the wounds. Will said he was feeling much better and gave the bunk to Eva. Her scratches looked angry, and she winced as Froglick cleaned them tenderly.

Afterwards, he went out to check the signal lamp. When he returned, he put more wood into the stove, then took out a bottle of brandy from a corner cupboard and poured them each a quantity in tin cups. He sat against the wall with Rowland and Will and told them about his meteorological duties on the island, the chief of which was his annual report on weather anomalies and any other natural phenomena worth observing. “This matter of the eruption will be of great interest at the Control Centre,” he said.

The night wind was howling eerily outside. Robbie hunkered against his master’s knees and would sometimes whimper back, for the sound was at times so human it was on the verge of being intelligible. As though, thought Rowland, it was the sad call of the mariners who’d perished in these seas.

Aside from Froglick, they weren’t a talkative group. Perhaps it was the effects of the brandy, for Rowland was suddenly numb with exhaustion and barely listened. Will’s head fell back and he dozed against the wall. Eva lay gazing at the ceiling for a while, then closed her eyes and was soon asleep. Around nine o’clock, Froglick gave out blankets and turned off the lamp.

THE NEXT MORNING,
when Rowland awoke, he went outside for a walk. The sky was overcast and the wind was very strong. The pounding of the waves made the ground under him vibrate so that the island didn’t feel that much different from a ship. When he got back to the cabin, Froglick had bathed the wounds of Eva and Will and had made some coffee and sandwiches. “The ship will be here by noon,” he said.

Eva was over at the bunk, talking quietly to Will. After a few minutes she came to Rowland, tears in her eyes. “I’d like to talk to you,” she said, “outside.”

Rowland went with her out of the cabin. She closed the door firmly behind them and spoke. He couldn’t help noticing how attractive she looked in the morning light, even though her eyes were wet and her lips quivering.

“Are you going on the ship?” she said.

“Of course I am,” he said. “We don’t want to be stuck here for another three months, do we?”

She put her hand on his arm and looked at him with great intensity. “I like you, Rowland,” she said. “You know that?”

He wasn’t quite sure what she was getting at. “I like you too, Eva,” he said.

“Then why don’t you stay on here?” She said this in a desperate way.

“Stay on here?” he said. “Why would anyone want to do that?”

“I’m not getting on that ship,” she said. “Or any other ship. I swore if I ever reached solid ground I’d never leave it.”

“Then why don’t you ask Will to stay?” Rowland said. “You know he’s the one you really like.”

“I did ask him,” she said. “He won’t stay. He says this place reminds him too much of where he came from and he’d be miserable here.”

Rowland was more touched than amused by her admission that he was only her second choice. “Then why don’t you go with him?” he said. “Wherever he’s going, you two might be happy together.”

She shook her head. “Never!” she said. “I can’t face going on a ship again.”