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Soon, she’ll have to consider what comes next.
5
As night draws its shutters across the sky, a leeward wind pushes them home. The sea throws cathedrals of blackwater heavenward.Huntsman’s Daughtersteers a perilous path between them. The boat’s white mast light and her red and green navigation lights cast diamonds and precious stones into the spray.
Lucy wants to go belowdecks and get an update on her family, but the conditions are too intense for one person to handle alone. Jake follows an easterly bearing, shouting instructions while Lucy keeps her eye on the raging water, constantly repositioning her tether.
She’s so cold and wet that everything takes three times longer than it should. The only thing to slip past her numbness is pain. Pain when she slams a shin against a moulding. Pain when the blisters on her winch hand tear open. Pain when seawater bites raw flesh. Pain in her back, in her neck. Pain, most of all, from her broken ribs. But far worse than the physical pain is the commotion inside her head.
That coastguard chopper. It found them, Lucy. Billie, Daniel, Fin – I can’t quite believe it but it did. They’re alive, all three. Your family are all alive.
Jake’s words allowed her to breathe again, but only barely. Because so many questions now demand answers. She has no clue how long they were in the water, nor their condition when rescued. Secondary drowning could kill them in the helicopter. Hypothermia might stop their hearts dead back on land.
Monstrous thoughts shouldn’t be given food to take on flesh. Deliberately, Lucy steers her mind away. But one thing she can’t outrun is that quietly insistent voice. Now, it overtakes her, relentless with its questions.
What was Daniel doing out here with Billie and Fin?
Why did he lie about where he was going?
Why did he take Fin out of school?
Worse, there are two voices now, where earlier there was only one. That second voice, she discovers, is far darker, far more insistent. And it doesn’t ask questions. It accuses.
You know, Lucy.
You know EXACTLY what he was doing.
No. She won’t have it. She loves Daniel. She trusts him with her life.
And Billie’s life?asks that first voice.Fin’s?
Lucy finds herself nodding through her tears. She knows her husband more intimately than anyone.
But sometimes the damage in a person runs deeper than anyone imagines. You’re not the only one carrying scars, Lucy. You, Nick, Daniel – you all reacted differently to broadly the same trauma. You went on your demeaning little love quest. Nick’s covetousness, over the years, grew into something monstrous.
And Daniel … Daniel’s reaction to childhood trauma was perhaps the most intense of all. His desire for control – his compulsion to create order from chaos, to micromanage the smallest details of his existence – veers close to the pathological.
And what did Daniel just lose, Lucy?
He lost control.
She thinks of the balance sheet on his laptop, the paperwork spread across his desk; of what happened between her and Nick a few weeks ago; of how much Daniel had been hurting.
‘Bullshit,’ she hisses. ‘It doesn’t make sense. He loves them. He lovesme.’
Around her, the sea reacts with scorn and fury. For almost an hour they’re forced to turn from shore and point directly into the storm. When the boat surfs down a wave, it picks up so much speed it risks ploughing beneath thenext. They deploy a sea anchor from the bow – an underwater chute that slows them in the water. It barely helps. Lucy loses count of breaking waves so immense they hardly seem scalable. She fears constantly for a snapped rudder or keel. Without them, they’ll have no way of keeping the bow aligned. A broadside from one of these monsters will buryHuntsman’s Daughterand likely drown them both.
Only once, off to port, does Lucy spot any sign of humanity – the red portlight of another boat travelling east at speed. She wonders if it’s the Tamar-class lifeboat returning to Skentel. Within moments it disappears into the darkness.
Around six thirty, they reel in the sea anchor and come about. By now, the pain in Lucy’s side is so intense she can only take small sips of air. Cold has settled like mercury in her bones.
Jake guides them east. The coastline emerges – a bank of purest black on which Skentel is a cluster of twinkling lights. Never has Lucy been more grateful to spot land. Never has she felt so frustrated that she doesn’t already stand upon it.
The distance shrinks. The source of each light grows clear. She sees the sulphur-yellow gas lamps outside the Goat Hotel; the brightly lit windows of homes higher up the slope; further south, the multicoloured lanterns of the Penny Moon campsite swinging on their cables.
Winking on and off along the beaches and bays are scores of other lights. They confuse her at first, until she realizes they must be the torch beams of shoreline searchers returning to Skentel.
The breakwater wall obscures much of the town’squay, but Lucy sees the lifeboat station perched above it, bathed by cold white spotlights. The Norman church of St Peter’s is similarly floodlit. No lights shine from Mortis Point. Up there, the darkness surrounding her home feels prescient.