Frenchman's Creek Page 9

  "You are being deliberately provoking."

  "Not at all. If you don't want to land the fish give the line to me."

  "I do want to land it."

  "Very well then. Haul in your line."

  She proceeded to do so, reluctantly, a little sulky, and then-feeling suddenly the tug and the pull upon the hook she began to haul faster, the wet line falling upon her lap and down to her bare feet; and laughing at him over her shoulder she said, "He's there, I can feel him, he's there, on the end of the hook."

  "Not quite so fast," he said quietly, "you may lose him. Gently now, bring him to the side of the boat."

  But she would not listen. She stood up in her excitement, letting the line slip for a moment, and then pulled harder than ever, and just as she caught the white gleam of the fish streaking to the surface it jerked upon the line, flashing sideways, and was gone.

  Dona gave a cry of disappointment, turning to him with reproachful eyes. "I have lost him," she said, "he has got away."

  He looked up at her, laughing, shaking the hair out of his eyes.

  "You were too excited."

  "I can't help it. It was such a lovely feeling-that tug on the line. And I wanted to catch him so much."

  "Never mind. Perhaps you will catch another."

  "My line is all in a tangle."

  "Give it to me."

  "No-I can do it myself."

  He took up his own line once again, and she bent down in the boat, gathering the hopeless tangle of wet line into her lap. It had twisted itself into countless loops and knots, and as she strove to unwind it with her fingers it became more tangled than before. She glanced at him, frowning with vexation, and he stretched out his hand, without looking at her, and took the tangle from her. She thought he would mock her, but he said nothing, and she leant back in the bows of the boat and watched his hands as he unravelled the loops and turns of the long wet line.

  The sun, away in the west, was flinging ribbons across the sky, and there were little pools of golden light upon the water. The tide was ebbing fast, gurgling past the bows of the boat.

  Farther down stream a solitary curlew padded in the mud, and presently he rose in the air, and whistled softly, and was gone.

  "When shall we build our fire?" said Dona.

  "When we have caught our supper," he answered.

  "And supposing we catch no supper?"

  "Then we cannot build a fire."

  She went on watching his hands, and miraculously, it seemed to her, the line became straight again, and loosely coiled, and he threw it once more over the side and gave her the end to hold.

  "Thank you," she said, her voice small, rather subdued, and looking across at him she saw that his eyes were smiling in the secret fashion she had grown to expect from him, and she knew, in some strange way, that the smile was connected with her although he said nothing, and she felt light-hearted suddenly, and curiously gay.

  They continued with their fishing, while a single blackbird, hidden in the woods the other side of the river, sang his intermittent song, meditative and sweet.

  It seemed to her, as they sat there side by side, without a word, that she had never known peace before, until this moment, that all the restless devils inside her who fought and struggled so often for release, were, because of this silence and his presence, now appeased. She felt, in a sense, like someone who had fallen under a spell, under some strange enchantment, because this sensation of quietude was foreign to her, who had lived hitherto in a turmoil of sound and movement. And yet at the same time the spell awoke echoes within her that she recognised, as though she had come to a place she had known always, and deeply desired, but had lost, through her own carelessness, or through circumstance, or the blunting of her own perception.

  She knew that it was this peace that she had wanted when she came away from London, and had come to Navron to find, but she knew also that she had found only part of it alone, through the woods, and the sky, and the river, it became full and complete when she was with him, as at the moment, or when he stole into her thoughts.

  She would be playing with the children at Navron, or wandering about the garden, filling the vases with flowers, and he away down in his ship in the creek, and because she had knowledge of him there her mind and her body became filled with life and warmth, a bewildering sensation she had never known before.

  "It is because we are both fugitives," she thought, "there is a bond between us," and she remembered what he had said that first evening, when he supped at Navron, about bearing the same blemish. Suddenly she saw that he was pulling in his line, and she leaned forward in the boat, her shoulder touching his shoulder, and she called excitedly, "Have you caught something?"

  "Yes," he said, "do you want to pull it in?"

  "It would not be fair," she said longingly, "he is your fish." Laughing, he gave her the line, and she brought the struggling fish to the side of the boat, and landed it on the bottom boards, where it jumped and flapped, coiling itself in the twisted line. She knelt down and seized it between her hands, her dress all wet and muddied from the river, her ringlets falling over her face.

  "He is not so big as the one I lost," she said.

  "They never are," he answered.

  "But I caught him, I brought him in all right, did I not?"

  "Yes, you did very well."

  She was still kneeling, trying to take the hook out of the mouth of the fish. "Oh, poor little thing, he is dying," she said. "I am hurting him, what shall I do?" She turned to him in great distress, and he came and knelt beside her, taking the fish from her hands and releasing the hook with a sudden jerk. Then he put his fingers in the mouth and bent back the head, so that the fish struggled an instant, and lay dead.

  "You have killed him," she said sadly.

  "Yes," he said, "was not that what you wanted me to do?"

  She did not answer, aware for the first time, now the excitement was over, how close he was to her, their shoulders touching, his hands beside her hand, and that he was smiling again in his silent secret way, and she was filled suddenly with a glow hitherto unknown to her, a brazen, shameless longing to be closer still, with his lips touching hers and his hands beneath her back. She looked away from him, out across the river, dumb and stricken with a new flame that had arisen within her, fearful that he might read the message in her eyes and so despise her, like Harry and Rockingham despised the women at the Swan, and she began to pat her ringlets into place again, and smooth her dress, silly little mechanical gestures she felt could not deceive him, but gave her some measure of protection from her own naked self.

  When she was calm again, she threw a glance at him over her shoulder, and saw that he had wound in the lines, and was taking the paddles in his hands.

  "Hungry?" he said.

  "Yes," she answered, her voice a little uncertain, not quite her own.

  "Then we will build our fire and cook our supper," he said. The sun had gone now, and the shadows were beginning to creep over the water. The tide was running fast, and he pushed the boat out into the channel so that the current helped to carry them down stream. She curled herself up in the bows and sat with her legs crossed beneath her, her chin cupped in her hands.

  The golden lights had gone, and the sky was paler now, mysterious and soft, while the water itself seemed darker than before. There was a smell of moss about the air, and the young green from the woods, and the bitter tang of bluebells. Once, in mid-stream, he paused, and listened, and turning her head towards the shore she heard, for the first time, a curious churring sound, low and rather harsh, fascinating in its quiet monotony.

  "Night-jar," he said, looking at her an instant, and then away again, and she knew, at that moment, that he had read the message in her eyes a little while before, and he did not despise her for it, he knew and understood, because he felt as she did, the same flame, the same longing. But because she was a woman and he a man these things would never be admitted to one another; they were both bound b
y a strange reserve until their moment came, which might be tomorrow, or the day after, or neverthe matter was not of their own choosing.

  He pushed on down stream without a word, and presently they came to the entrance of the creek, where the trees crowded to the water's edge, and edging up close inshore into the narrow channel they came to a little clearing in the woods where there had once been a quay, and he rested on his paddles and said: "This?"

  "Yes," she answered, and he pushed the nose of the boat into the soft mud, and they climbed ashore.

  He pulled the boat out of the tide, and then reached for his knife, and kneeling beside the water cleaned the fish, calling over his shoulder for Dona to build the fire.

  She found some dry twigs, under the trees, and broke them across her knee, her dress torn now and hopelessly crumpled, and she thought, laughing to herself, of Lord Godolphin and his lady, and their stare of bewilderment could they see her now, no better than a travelling gypsy woman, with all a gypsy's primitive feelings too, and a traitor to her country into the bargain.

  She built the sticks, one against the other. He came up from the water's edge, having cleaned the fish, and knelt beside the fire, with his flint and tinder, and slowly kindled the flame, which came in a little flash at first, and then burnt brighter. Presently the long sticks crackled and flared, and they looked across the flames and laughed at one another.

  "Have you ever cooked fish, in the open?" he asked. She shook her head, and he cleared a little place in the ashes beneath the sticks, and laid a flat stone in the centre, and placed the fish upon it. He cleaned his knife on his breeches, and then, crouching beside the fire, he waited a few minutes until the fish began to brown, when he turned it with his knife, so that the heat came to it more easily. It was darker here in the creek than it had been in the open river, and the trees threw long shadows down to the quay. There was a radiance in the deepening sky belonging only to those nights of midsummer, brief and lovely, that whisper for a moment in time and go forever. Dona watched his hands, busy with the fish, and glanced up at his face, intent upon his cooking, the brows frowning a little in concentration, and his skin reddened by the glow of the fire. The good food smell came to her nostrils and to his at the same moment, and he looked at her and smiled, saying not a word, but turned the fish once again to the crackling flame.

  Then, when he had judged it brown enough, he lifted it with his knife onto a leaf, the fish all sizzling and bubbling with the heat, and slicing it down the middle he pushed one half of the fish onto the edge of the leaf, giving her the knife, and taking the other half between his fingers began to eat, laughing at her as he did so. "It is a pity," said Dona, spearing her fish with the knife, "that we have nothing to drink." In answer he rose to his feet and went down to the boat at the water's edge, coming back in a moment with a long slim bottle in his hands.

  "I had forgotten," he said, "that you were used to supping at the Swan."

  She did not reply at once, stung momentarily by his words, and then, as he poured the wine into the glass he had brought for her, she asked, "What do you know of my suppers at the Swan?" He licked his fingers, sticky with the fish, and poured some wine into a second glass for himself.

  "The Lady St. Columb sups cheek by jowl with the ladies of the town," he said, "and later roysters about the streets and highways like a boy with his breeches down, returning home as the night-watchman seeks his bed."

  She held her glass between her hands, not drinking, staring down at the dark water, and into her mind suddenly came the thought that he believed her bawdy, promiscuous, like the women in the tavern, and considered that her behaviour now, sitting beside him in the open air at night, cross-legged, like a gypsy, was but another brief interlude in a series of escapades, that she had, in a similar fashion, behaved thus with countless others, with Rockingham, with all Harry's friends and acquaintances, that she was nothing but a spoilt whore, lusting after new sensations, without even a whore's excuse of poverty. She wondered why the thought that he might believe this of her should cause her such intolerable pain, and it seemed to her that the light had gone out of the evening, and all the lovely pleasure was no more. She wished suddenly she was at Navron, at home, in her own room, with James coming in to her, staggering on fat unsteady legs, so that she could pick him up in her arms, and hold him tight, and bury her face in his smooth fat cheek and forget this new strange anguish that filled her heart, this feeling of sorrow, of lost bewilderment.

  "Are you not thirsty after all?" he said, and she turned to him, her eyes tormented. "No," she said. "No, I believe not," and fell silent again, playing with the ends of her sash.

  It seemed to her that the peace of their being together was broken, and a constraint had come between them. His words had hurt her, and he knew that they had hurt her, and as they stared into the fire without a word all the unspoken hidden things flamed in the air, creating a brittle atmosphere of unrest.

  At last he broke the silence, his voice very low and quiet.

  "In the winter," he said, "when I used to lie in your room at Navron, and look at your picture, I made my own pictures of you in my mind. I would see you fishing perhaps, as we did this afternoon, or watching the sea from the decks of La Mouette. And somehow, the pictures would not fit with the servants' gossip I had heard from time to time. The two were not in keeping."

  "How unwise of you," she said slowly, "to make pictures of someone you had never seen."

  "Possibly," he said, "but it was unwise of you to leave your portrait in your bedroom, untended and alone, when pirates such as myself make landings on the English coast."

  "You might have turned it," she said, "with its face to the wall-or even put another in its place, of the true Dona St. Columb, roystering at the Swan, and dressing up in the breeches of her husband's friends, and riding at midnight with a mask on her face to frighten old solitary women."

  "Was that one of your pastimes?"

  "It was the last one, before I became a fugitive. I wonder you did not hear it, with the rest of the servants' gossip."

  Suddenly he laughed, and reaching to the little pile of wood behind him, he threw fresh fuel onto the fire, and the flames crackled and leapt into the air, "It is a pity you were not born a boy," he said, "you could have discovered then what danger meant. Like myself, you are an outlaw at heart, and dressing up in breeches and frightening old women was the nearest thing to piracy you could imagine."

  "Yes," she said, "but you-when you have captured your prize or made your landing-sail away with a sense of achievement, whereas I, in my pitiful little attempt at piracy, was filled with self-hatred, and a feeling of degradation."

  "You are a woman," he said, "and you do not care for killing fishes either."

  This time, looking across the fire, she saw that he was smiling at her in a mocking way, and it seemed as though the constraint between them vanished, they were themselves again, and she could lean back on her elbow and relax.

  "When I was a lad," he said, "I used to play at soldiers, and fight for my king. And then, in a thunderstorm, when the lightning came and the thunder clapped, I would hide my head in my mother's lap and put my fingers in my ears. Also, to make my soldiering more realistic, I would paint my hands red and pretend to be wounded-but when I saw blood for the first time on a dog that was dying, I ran away and was sick."

  "That was like me," she said, "that was how I felt, after my masquerade."

  "Yes," he said, "that is why I told you."

  "And now," she said, "you don't mind blood any more, you are a pirate, and fighting is your life-robbing and killing, and hurting. All the things you pretended to do and were afraid to do-now you don't mind them any longer."

  "On the contrary," he said, "I am often very frightened."

  "Yes," she said, "but not in the same way. Not frightened of yourself. Not frightened of being afraid."

  "No," he said. "No, that has gone for ever. That went when I became a pirate."

  The long twigs
in the fire began to crumple and fall, and to break into fragments. The flames burnt low, and the ashes were white.

  "Tomorrow," he said, "I must begin to plan again."

  She glanced across at him, but the firelight no longer shone upon him, and his face was in shadow.

  "You mean-you must go away?" she said.

  "I have been idle too long," he answered, "the fault lies in the creek. I have allowed it to take a hold on me. No, your friends Eustick and Godolphin shall have a run for their money. I shall see if I can bring them into the open."

  "You are going to do something dangerous?"

  "Of course."

  "Will you make another landing along the coast?"

  "Very probably."

  "And risk capture, and possibly death?"

  "Yes."

  "Why-and for what reason?"

  "Because I want the satisfaction of proving to myself that my brain is better than theirs."

  "But that is a ridiculous reason."

  "It is my reason, nevertheless."

  "It is an egotistical thing to say. A sublime form of conceit."

  "I know that."

  "It would be wiser to sail back to Brittany."

  "Far wiser."

  "And you will be leading your men into something very desperate."

  "They will not mind."

  "And La Mouette may be wrecked, instead of lying peacefully at anchor in a port across the channel."

  "La Mouette was not built to lie peacefully in a port."

  They looked at each other across the ashes, and his eyes held her for a long instant, with a light in them like the flame that had spent itself in the fire, and at last he stretched himself and yawned, and said: "It is a pity indeed that you are not a boy, you could have come with me."

  "Why must I be a boy to do that?"

  "Because women who are afraid of killing fishes are too delicate and precious for pirate ships."

  She watched him a moment, biting the end of her finger, and then she said, "Do you really believe that?"

  "Naturally."

  "Will you let me come this once, to prove to you that you are wrong?"

  "You would be sea-sick," he said.

  "No."

  "You would be cold, and uncomfortable, and frightened."

  "No."

  "You would beg me to put you ashore just as my plans were about to work successfully."