The Wind and the Spray (3 page)

“Then I’ll tell you. If we make good time, and by the look of that sea I strongly doubt it, we’ll be at the Hump by tonight.”

“Tonight?”

“What’s wrong with the night-time? There’s nothing lovelier—and more romantic, I’m told—than moonlight on the water, all that.”

“Can—can you find your way in the night?”

“Luke and I could find our way to Humpback if we were dumped in any ocean. On the Pacific Ocean, our home ground you might say, it’s candy, Miss Teal.”

“Do we stop anywhere?”

“We take in supplies and collect mail from Anna Head. That should be late afternoon or early dusk. Then we push across to home.”

“Anna is your nearest mainland?”

“As far as Humpback is concerned the only mainland. Sydney, for us, doesn’t exist, except on an occasional shopping spree, or when the need arises for a particular employee that Anna can’t supply.”

“A redhead, for instance?”

“Exactly,” the man said.

While they had been talking, the sea had been rising. Laurel, hearing the deepening rush of water along the planks, wheeled round and saw now that the waves had angry crests.

Luke, at the wheel, called out that it was going to be dirty, and almost at once the boat began lifting steeply and dropping afterwards into foaming troughs.

Th
e younger man took over at once.

Luke came to stand beside Laurel.

“All right, miss?” he asked kindly.

“Of course.” She was, too, except for the beginnings of a carping little headache. It had been a hectic week getting ready for this departure. She had not liked to leave Mr. Chester in the lurch, so she had stopped on till Friday and that had given her very little time to shop, pack, change her address, write to David, say her goodbyes.

The girls, too, had insisted on a farewell theatre night, and since she was to be their guest she could scarcely refuse. She had not wanted to, anyway, she liked them too much; all the same it had made a short time even shorter, and her necessarily curtailed sleeping hours were telling on her now.

Then again, she thought ruefully, a trifle uneasily, Esther’s and Marion’s and Lynn’s reaction to her announcement that she was going to an island had been discouraging. They had looked dubiously at each other, obviously wondering whether they had done a wise thing in recommending her to Mr. Kittey. She had laughed at their doubts, but once away from them her laughter had died. Looking around now at the grey sea and feeling the headache growing stronger and stronger, she knew the laughter was dead indeed.

Luke had gone into the galley. Presently he came out
with mugs of steaming tea.

Laurel took hers eagerly, cupping her hands around the hot thick china, for the wind was blowing cold, the spray was so sharp that it pierced like needles of ice.

After a few gulps she felt a little better.

“Do you work on the whaling station, Mr. Lucas?
”

“Call me Luke, miss, everyone does. No, I don’t, I work on the boats. Two, there are, a whaler, the
Clyde,
and the
Leeward
here. There’s a third on the slips about the
Leeward's
size, the
Windward
it’s to be. Building it himself, he is. Nothing Nor can’t do.” He nodded his head to the man he previously only had referred to as Cap and who was now drinking his tea in long quaffs, one large, lean, dark hand on the wheel.

Nor
...
that was what it sounded like. Norman, probably, or Nor as in Norton, Norville, something of the sort. It surprised Laurel a little. Something about the man seemed not entirely Australian, not Australian as she had encountered Australians, and she had expected a different variety of name, a name with a foreign origin perhaps.
The headache was coining back, and more viciously than
b
efore.
She put the tea down, too tired even to drink.

The man at the wheel put his cup down at the same time, but unlike hers drained to the last drop. As he did so, he gave Laurel a quick glance. At once he
signaled
Luke to his side.

“All right?” he asked Laurel when Luke had taken over
from him.

“Of course I’m all right.”

“You’d better take that tablet after all.”

“I don’t need any tablets, I’ve only a headache.”

“Call it what you like, even the French mal-de-mer if it pleases you, it still comes to the same thing—and the same result. Take this tablet and go and he down.”

“I tell you I’m not sick, I—I
—
”

Suddenly the headache seemed all the pain in the world housed in Laurel’s own inadequate brow. She put her hand up to her blinded eyes, swaying a little at the sharp agony, and in that moment he swept her into his arms, carried her into the small, cabin, placed her on the bunk without any more argument or ado.

“I—” she protested.

“Lie still.”

“I’m not sick”.

“Will you shut up,” he said.

He left her then, and she lay still with pain, frightened to move her head—until something drove the pain away, or at least shoved it aside, so that a new sensation could take possession itself.

It was fear; plain, unadulterated fear. She was simply, completely, thoroughly and quite horribly
scared.

For the wind was not the comradely wind of her wind and spray any longer, it was a gale.

It was a gale that was screeching its hate of her, of them, of the
Leeward,
of the entire world, that was sending the sleet down like javelins, that was whipping the dark clouds until they spread into one cloud and it was as obscure as night.

We’re going to go down, Laurel thought. She shut her eyes in terror. She could hear the waves slobbering greedily over the deck. Down, she thought again, down, down, down
...
oh, David, David my dear.

Then abruptly she wasn’t thinking of watery graves or of David any longer, in fact as her nausea increased she would have welcomed a watery end, she was just being unromantically and very thoroughly sick.

She was sick for hours.

Some time through those hours someone attended her, quietly, efficiently, gently, kindly. It would be the little dried up man Lucas, of course, he had that sympathetic sort of face.

He wiped her brow. He supplied fresh towels. He held something for her to sip. He said in a faraway but infinitely encouraging voice: “It happens to everyone ... it can happen any time ... lie still.”

At last, depleted, exhausted, she slept.

There must have been something in whatever she had sipped, for she knew as soon as she opened her eyes that she had slept a very long time. It was the pearliness of the light that told her, it was not just the clear of after-storm, it was not the first veiling of dusk, it was morning, she thought. That meant it was “tomorrow” morning
...
that meant she had been sleeping since yesterday
...
sleeping all night.

The boat was travelling slowly and gently now over quieter waters. She propped herself on one elbow and peered out of the cabin window. Ahead was land. This must be Anna Head where they stopped to take supplies. The storm had slowed them considerably, they must be hours and hours behind.

Luke pulled the curtain that formed the doorway aside and smiled in at her.

She smiled warmly back. She would never forget those kindly administrations last night.

“Want to see landfall?” he invited.

“I glimpsed it through the window. I couldn’t see any shops, though.”

“Aren’t any.”

“But your captain said you stocked up at Anna.”

Luke laughed at that, his dried-up skin going into a million creases.

“That stuff Nor gave you sure did the trick.”

“Nor?” she echoed blankly.

She knew whom he meant; her echo had not been interrogation, it had been disbelief
...
disbelief and incredulity at his words. The Rock, not Luke, administering to her last night!

“You were leading us a fine dance, miss,” Luke was smiling, “until Cap knocked you out.”

“Knocked me out!”

“With a—sleeping draught.” Luke grinned slyly this time. “It was getting dirtier and dirtier, it needed both of us at the wheel, it was the only thing to do. Besides
“
— another pleating of his brown nut of a face—“reckon Nor had given you your money’s worth already in attention,
reckon it was only fair you flaked out and gave us a chance to get through.”

So she had heard aright the first time. So it had not been Lucas wiping her brow, bringing fresh towels, murmuring encouraging words ... horror of all horrors, holding a bowl while she was sick.
She had disliked him before, but now she despised him. You could not help but hate a man who had held a bowl while you were ill.

“He gave me a sleeping draught?” she asked.

Again the grim. “An overproof one, miss.”

“And I slept right through Anna and the hours from Anna across—across to here?”

She looked out at “here”—only rocks and some trees and breaking surf so far, but roofs of houses rapidly appearing, and a jetty, and people on the jetty waiting for the
Leeward
to berth.

She got up and hurriedly changed into her skirt and over blouse, splashed her face with water, outlined some lipstick, ran a comb through her hair.

She went on deck. The captain was at the wheel amidships bringing his boat home from the sea. He did not look at her, and sensitively, remembering last night, she looked away from him.

The people’s faces stopped being blurs and took on shape and colour.
One man was away in front of the rest, a little boy on each arm. The three waved excitedly, and spontaneously Laurel waved back.

“The kids,” said the Captain beside her. Evidently Luke had taken the wheel again to bring the
Leeward
in.

She nodded without turning, wondering why she had waved back so spontaneously
...
then she saw the reason. It was because the three were so alike, quiet charmingly, winningly alike, alike enough not to be just a man holding in each arm the two children of another man, this man beside her, but holding his own sons.

She glanced at her employer.

“They don’t resemble you.”

“No, they don’t. They’re Blakes.”

“But you’re Blake.”

“Who said so?”

“Mr. Kittey.”

“I’m sure he didn’t, he’s been attending us Larsens for years.”

“Larsen! Then
...”
She glanced to the children on the little quay, to the man.

“That’s Peter Blake, my sister’s husband, in other words my brother-in-law.”

“And—the children?”

“His children, of course, isn’t that obvious? As I said, they’re Blakes, not like Nathalie at all.”

“Nathalie?”

“My sister, and a Larsen. Not”—his brows coming together in a furious line—“that you’d ever notice that fact.”

“You mean she has red hair and you have fair.”

“Not fair, weathered, and I didn’t mean that at all, I meant other differences.”

He did not tell her what differences, so she went on in a strain of her own.

“So it was Mr. Blake who wanted someone titian,” she murmured.

“Do
I
look that sort of fool?” he returned.

“He is the brother-in-law, not you.”

“We’re both brothers-in-law,” said Larsen with patient forbearance as though with a small, very stupid child, “but I think I know what you mean. You believed I was the married man, but you were wrong.”

All at once he was smirking slyly but quite delightedly. Then with eyes sparkling diabolically he turned on Laurel and gave her an almost ear-to-ear maddening grin.

“Yes, you were wrong, I’m not the married man but
that
man, remember?”

“What man?”

“The one available male,” he reminded, “on Humpback Island, but the one”—his eyes swept her baitingly—“with other ideas.”

CHAPTER THREE

ALTHOUGH they were within speaking distance of the people on the jetty, Luke turned the boat seaward in a wide curve.

“It needs the right phase of tide and the right swell as well as dead reckoning to moor at any of the Hump piers,” announced the man by Laurel’s side. “Luke will have to do a second run.” He took out, rolled and lit a cigarette.

Laurel stared out at what she could see of her future headquarters ... a craggy coastline with an occasional break of creamy beach, behind the crags thick jungles of trees except where the forest had been cleared for plantations, a few rolling hills that were quite moderate but appeared higher because Humpback Island was only a small place, two hills of the group loftier than the rest.

Her eyes took in details, but her mind did not register them. She was thinking indignantly of what this man beside her had just said

She did not comment on his explanation of the second run, instead she broke out impulsively, “You don’t care about women, do you, Mr. Larsen?”

There was no impulsiveness in his reply. He said quite coolly and very surely, “No, I don’t.”

Luke was turning the
Leeward
now, turning it slowly, watching for his opportunity, keeping his eye on the pier. The boat almost stopped, the engine barely ticked.