The Romeo and Juliet Code (21 page)

Derek and I rang up Mr. Henley immediately. Thank goodness he had a telephone as a lot of people along the coast did not. It was a brooding windy day actually, not exactly rainy, but the sky was almost without color. A lot of the trees above the shore no longer had leaves, or if they did, they were raggedy and wind-torn and brown.

When we reached Mr. Henley on the telephone, he told us he would like to check his lobster traps and that it would be good to get out on the water. We were to meet him at the dock in front of the White Whale Inn, which was way down the beach to the north of our house.

The White Whale Inn was closed now since the season was over, and all the windows and doors were boarded and shuttered up like everything else out here, but the dock was still in use. Derek and I arrived early at the dock, and while we were waiting, I looked up at the large weatherworn inn. It seemed completely deserted. I quite hoped that Mr. Churchill and Mr. Roosevelt had come here for their secret meeting in August, when the hotel had been open. I tried to imagine them sitting out there in wicker chairs talking about the war. “Do you think they came here for their secret meeting?” I called to Derek.

“No, silly!” he shouted back. “They went up to Newfoundland. Everyone knows that now.”

“Still, it would have been the perfect place, don’t you think?” I cried out into the roar of the ocean. “And it would have been lovely to have them so near by.”

Just then, we saw Mr. Henley’s small lobster boat coming round the bend and we ran down to the dock and waved. And when he came up and shut off his motor, we climbed in. Derek put a life jacket on me. He tucked it right over my head and showed me where to buckle it, and all the while, I was looking into his face and thinking that he was ever so knowledgeable.

Mr. Henley asked right away about our secret report on the great blue heron. “But aren’t they gone by now, migrated south, or do they stay behind all winter?” he said, starting up the motor again.

I stared blankly at Mr. Henley. “Um, well, actually, great blue herons decide at the last minute…. Um, that’s why they stand on one leg; they are deciding about migrating. Should we go or should we stay? That sort of thing.”

“Our secret report will cover all that,” said Derek, nudging me with his good elbow.

The boat was cutting through the water now and I was looking down into the depths of the ocean for seals. In the summer, you often saw them sunning on rocks. We putted along through the waves, the shore and rocky cliffs passing by above us. We saw the Bathburn house then from a distance with its widow’s walk and the tower room at the top of the sky. The whole place seemed wrapped in isolated autumn silence.

Derek said, “I heard there was some waiter at the White Whale Inn this summer who took off during his shift and cut all the telephone wires to the inn.”

“He was unstable,” said Mr. Henley. “He just up and left. No one knows where he went. I guess the police were looking for him because the guy had a bunch of Nazi flags in his room.”

“And they say we are teetering on the brink of war,” said Derek.

“Yes, they do say that,” said Mr. Henley. “Any day now, I’m guessing. Any day now.

“A sea so gray I woke all night

and rose at dawn to find dark light.

“Like poetry?”

“Usually,” I said. “You seem very different to me without your postman’s suit on. I almost didn’t recognize you. You look like a true fisherman.”

“Ah,” said Mr. Henley. “‘
All the world’s a stage and all men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances and one man in his time plays many parts.’
William Shakespeare, a great poet and a true visionary.”

“Mr. William Shakespeare?” I said. “Isn’t that the chap who wrote the play
Romeo and Juliet
?”

“Indeed it is. The greatest playwright ever.”

“Shakespeare?” Derek said. “Would you say that you enjoy his plays?”

“I would,” said Mr. Henley. “I’m not just a mailman and a fisherman. I also write and read poetry. I send my poems to the
Saturday Evening Post
, hoping to get published. But they always send them back to me, saying ‘No, thank you. No, thank you. No, thank you.’”

“Well, it’s their loss, Mr. Henley, I’m sure,” I said.

“Yes,” he said.

“So,” I added, “did I hear you say you favor this Mr. Shakespeare?”

“Yes, I most certainly do,” said Mr. Henley. “As a reader and a writer, I most certainly favor Shakespeare.”

Derek and I looked at each other straight on. Our eyes snapped tight and we both nearly jumped up out of the boat and leaped into the tossing sky.

But we were nearing Peace Island. It loomed before us, and thousands of birds, whole clouds of them, were calling and crying and fluttering against the rocky cliffs that seemed to jut straight up from the sea.

I followed Derek as he climbed the steep path that zigzagged up the side of Peace Island. There were wild, scruffy, autumn-colored rosebushes on either side of the narrow way. I could look straight down and see the now-green deep water far below us. Seabirds like puffins and storm petrels and terns and seagulls hovered and landed on the cliffs above us. I could see Mr. Henley and his small blue lobster boat moving out towards the open sea. I rather wished he would have stayed closer by.

The wind was picking up. It was almost howling, like a choir singing in Saint Paul’s Cathedral in London. I kept hearing The Gram in my mind saying,
Stay off those rocky bluffs to the south of here, Flissy. The wind gets ferocious over there and a little stick of a girl like you could be swept out to sea in a snap
.

When we had climbed all the way to the top of the cliff, where the island then flattened out into long waving grass, we could look off into the distance and see Mr. Henley’s boat getting smaller and smaller.

“Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?” I called out to the wind.

And Derek said, “Shhh. We’re not alone on the island, remember. But you’re right, he
is
our Romeo. Why didn’t we ask him outright, Flissy? We should have.”

“No,” I said, “we can’t risk it. If we ask him outright, he might say, ‘Oh no, I’m way too busy.’ We really must be terribly clever about this. Don’t you think?”

I looked off one more time at the sea stretching away into forever. Mr. Henley’s boat was fast becoming a blue speck on the horizon. What if he forgot to come back for us? What if a stray Nazi U-boat prowling about the coast came upon Mr. Henley’s little lobster boat?

Seabirds still circled overhead, and the long switch grass rolled and rippled and simmered like water. “Come on,” said Derek. “Hurry. We don’t know how long Gideon will be out here. Let’s head to Savage Point.”

“Savage Point?” I said.

“Yep, it’s named after a hermit who used to live out there. He took care of the lighthouse. His name was Joe Savage. People in town used to say, ‘Joe Savage took a bath once a year, even when he didn’t need one.’” Derek smiled up and out at all that was before us.

“There’s a lighthouse?” I said.

“It’s not in use anymore since they built a new one over on Turtleback Island. The Savage Point Lighthouse is pretty much abandoned.”

The wind was behind us and it felt as if we blew through the wide field of grass, as if we were flying across the open stretch, as if the clouds were piling up higher and higher above us, as if the dark trees against the sky were ripping back and forth faster and faster. Derek got ahead of me and I had to call out to him to slow down, but my voice seemed lost in the wind. Finally, we came to a wooded sheltered area and we slid down a steep slope into a rocky, bushy glen and then we went through a group of trees that were short and bent over, as if they had been standing up too long against the weather.

Just on the other side of the trees, there it was, the Savage Point Lighthouse, sitting high up on the farthest and outermost spot on the island, the final piece of land before the vast open Atlantic. We came upon it slowly although the wind seemed almost to push us along. The lighthouse was gray, a forlorn bitter gray. Its windows were broken. The door hung open on loosened hinges. A rope was strung across the path and there was a sign hung on it that said D
ANGER
. N
O TRESPASSING
.

As we got closer, we began to hear a noise like a small motorboat coming from inside the lighthouse. I looked out at the ocean and could see nothing but the endless water, with no sign of Mr. Henley.

Derek stepped over the rope and moved towards the half-open door. He took my hand in his and suddenly, though I was scared, my hand felt tingly and warm lying in Derek’s hand, almost as if I could feel all of Derek’s being in his palm pressed close to my palm. I followed him through the door, nothing between our palms, just his against mine.

Inside, light came down in shafts through broken windows from above. Old plaster lay on the steps that curved round and up, round and up, to the top of the lighthouse. Palm against palm, I followed Derek. The noise was a kind of even hum now. Up the steps and round the first turn, we looked out a broken window straight down into a drop-off to the sea below. Round the next curve, there was more plaster, an old pair of boots set off to the side, a bird nest above a broken window, hay and bird droppings, and the low drone of a motor as we rounded up and up. Then at the top there was a green wooden door mostly closed, only a crack left open.

Derek, still holding my hand, leaned closer and we both peered through the crack. Uncle Gideon was sitting at a table, his back to us. On the table was a machine connected by a wire to a small motor on the floor. Uncle Gideon was tapping out something on the machine. Even over the motor, we could hear tap, tap, tap. Tap, tap, tap.

Everything sifted through me that next week like a great confusing kaleidoscope—the image of Uncle Gideon sitting at that table with his back to us, the man from Washington who had visited with the locked briefcase, the film hidden in the little pincushion, the gun in the overcoat pocket in London, the calling away of my Winnie and Danny, the Romeo and Juliet code, and the letters. The letters. All of it seemed to fit together to form a picture that felt blurry and dark to me, a picture I couldn’t quite read. All the images cut and fluttered and changed form in my mind at night. Then the house would seem even darker and more ominous. There were shadows on the stairs. Lights seemed to flicker in the parlor. The news of the war on the radio would play in my mind over and over again.

And yet, by day, everything seemed to go on as usual. No one seemed worried that the Nazis might come here in their U-boats. People were not ordered to put dark curtains over their windows at night to keep the light from alerting planes overhead of our presence. There were no food rations, and most anything you needed you could buy in the grocery store in downtown Bottlebay.

“Flissy, of course you would be more sensitive to all that,” said Aunt Miami. “You were there and saw all of it.” We were sitting in the library. The whole Bathburn family was in there reading away. Uncle Gideon got up for a moment to put on some water for tea, and when he returned, we both suddenly looked at Aunt Miami. She was back behind her book, reading again. Uncle Gideon and I happened to see the cover of the book both at the same time, and it was not
Romeo and Juliet.
Aunt Miami was reading a book called
The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I looked at Uncle Gideon and he looked at me. Then he put his hands together like he was praying and he rolled his eyes up at the ceiling and smiled. Aunt Miami had broken free.