Page 6

Eddie opened his eyes and blinked rapidly for a moment, and then caught my unhappy expression. “It’s not your fault. God, what a mess though. The diary’s okay, at least.”

“Henry Jessup’s diary,” I said evenly. I poured some hot cocoa into a mug and set it on the small kitchen table. “Here.”

Eddie groaned. “God. That diary is my whole thesis! I mean, my actual thesis is on the laptop, but everything should be backed up. It’s the diary that’s important.

I promised Theresa, my advisor, that I’d look after it.

She’d murder me if anything happened to the original.

We have a digital copy, but you—you don’t want to hear about that.

” He exhaled slowly. “It’s good. The diary’s okay. It’s good.”

I cleared my throat. “Henry Jessup the bosun on the Dauntless ? He died here, on the island.”

“No! That’s the thing.” Eddie’s eyes widened, his expression brightening. “He didn’t die on the island. He took a boat and made it all the way to Sumatra! That’s where he died, and that’s where his diary turned up, in an estate sale a few years ago. Theresa bought it on eBay, can you believe that?”

“About as much as I can believe he made it all the way to Sumatra from here,” I said wryly.

“No, listen, this would make it one of the world’s most amazing feats of navigation,” Eddie said. “Right up there with Bligh, except Henry Jessup did it alone .”

“He died on the island.” I sat opposite Eddie and curled my fingers around my mug of cocoa. “His name’s in the old church.”

“It’s a lie,” Eddie said. “He didn’t die here. He escaped , because he wanted to alert the British and have the men here put on trial for their crimes.”

“Their crimes?” I asked. “The mutiny?”

“Not just that. The diary’s full of them.

The murder of George Hawthorne and a bunch of the male passengers from the Antigone .

The rape of the female passengers. There was one woman, Betsy Howard, who was already married, so they killed her husband so that John Dinsmore could marry her instead.

” Eddie’s voice grew louder, his expression more animated.

“It wasn’t a mutiny against George Hawthorne because he was a bastard.

It was a mutiny because he was trying to stop his men from going full-on Lord of the Flies .

George Hawthorne wasn’t the bad guy. Josiah Nesmith was! ”

“That’s not true.” The denial was instinctive, and it was out before I could even think of biting it back. It was in my blood, literally . I took in Eddie’s dismayed expression. “I mean, you’re saying that everything here is built on a lie .”

“I guess,” Eddie said. He shrugged. “But so what? That’s how it works, you know? There are two sides to every story. More, in most cases. Sometimes what we’re all taught turns out to be, well, bullshit. That’s history for you.”

Except it wasn’t history, not really. It was here and it was now.

We islanders weren’t divorced from our origins.

We celebrated them. We lived them every day.

Eddie was talking about history like it was some old, dusty pages, but this was our lives.

It was impossible to explain to mainlanders.

I’d tried, a few times, in Sydney, with my flatmates and my classmates.

Tried to explain how things weren’t the same Dauntless Island, how the mutiny had taken a little branch of humanity and snapped it off.

How it had been planted in different soil and something new had grown from it.

How our origins and subsequent isolation had made us different.

But I’d never been able to explain it well.

It wasn’t something you could grasp unless you’d seen it. Eddie still wasn’t getting it.

He’d been down in the village earlier, a Hawthorne sitting on a bombshell, and it didn’t even occur to him how much damage it had done. How personally the islanders would have taken it. Not even when someone had attacked him tonight.

My first instinct was to take it personally too.

Not to the lengths whoever had attacked Eddie had taken it, but I could see how they had.

I could understand it, and it sat heavily in my gut.

Understanding felt too close to justification, and it left a sour taste in my mouth.

I didn’t like what it said about Dauntless, or about me.

“I need to report I was assaulted,” Eddie said at last, his fingers wrapped around his mug. “I need to call the police.”

I grimaced.

“Oh.” Eddie’s face fell as the realisation hit him. “There’s no police officer on this island either, is there?”

“No.”

“So…how do I report a crime, exactly?” Eddie asked slowly.

I nodded toward the radio in the corner. “Anything urgent, they’ll send the water police, or the chopper. Otherwise, the copper from the mainland comes over once a fortnight as part of his beat.”

“They’re not going to send a chopper for a stolen laptop, are they?”

“No,” I said. “They’re not.”

Eddie’s brow wrinkled. “But you must have some sort of government agency on this island, right?”

“Not really. I mean, there are only two actual government employees on the island. Mavis, who runs the post office, and, well, me. And Short Clarry the mayor, but he’s elected, not hired.”

“Mmm.” Eddie set his mug down again. “Which government department do you work for?”

“Transport.”

“Ah. No offence, Joe, but none of those options are exactly filling me with confidence right now.”

I shrugged. “That’s fair.”

“But you are probably a slightly better option than a mayor or the lady who runs the post office.”

“Also fair.”

“Will you help me find out who attacked me?” Eddie asked, his worry etched plainly on his face. “Also, I would really like my laptop back.”

Mavis was so right about Eddie. He was nothing but trouble. Earnest, tousled, dark-eyed trouble.

“Yeah,” I said, because apparently I’d never met trouble I didn’t like. “I can try.”

Eddie’s smile was almost worth it.

“You can sleep on the couch,” I told him, getting up to put his mug in the sink. “I’ll get you some blankets.”

“Thanks. Oh, and Joe?”

I turned.

“You look good.” Eddie gestured to my face. “The trimmed beard. It suits you.”

I made a sound that I hoped passed as ambivalent and fled to bed.

* * *

M orning dawned bright and cool. The salt air smelled fresh, holding no trace of last night’s storm.

I lay awake for a moment, wondering what felt different about the day.

It took me a moment to realise—Hiccup wasn’t pinning my legs down like she usually did.

I threw off the blankets, climbed out of bed, and dressed.

I rolled my shoulders to loosen them as I walked down the hallway.

I paused at the door to the small living room.

Eddie was curled up on the couch, almost hidden under a nest of blankets.

Hiccup was burrowed into the space between his bent knees and the back of the couch.

She blinked guiltily when she saw me and jumped down onto the floor.

She followed me through to the kitchen, her claws clicking on the stone, and I opened the back door so she could go outside for her morning inspection and peeing ritual.

The morning air was cold on my face, and I thought back to what Eddie had said last night about my clean-shaven look. My flush warmed me soon enough. I shoved my hands into the pockets of my coat and went back inside, leaving the kitchen door propped open for Hiccup.

I checked the fridge for bacon and eggs.

I had plenty of bacon thanks to Wednesday’s groceries, but I was down to five eggs.

I’d have to visit Katrina Finch and get some more.

Amy kept telling me to get some point-of-lay hens sent over from the mainland.

It was a good idea, but I hadn’t got around to building a henhouse yet.

It’d have to be a solid one, or the hens would get blown away in a storm.

The henhouse was a spring project, probably.

The smell of bacon and eggs brought Eddie shuffling into the kitchen, a pair of my sweatpants hanging loosely from his slim hips, one of my shirts slipping off his shoulder.

“How’s your head?”

“Not too bad,” Eddie said. “But I won’t turn down an aspirin if you’ve got one.”

“I think I can manage that. Grab a seat.”

The smell of bacon and eggs also brought Hiccup running, and she sat attentively by the stove in the hope that I’d drop something for her. I did, most mornings, but most mornings I didn’t have a guest to feed as well.

Her mournful gaze followed me as I took the plates to the table.

“This view is amazing.” Eddie’s gaze fixed on the kitchen windows.

I glanced outside. The lighthouse obscured part of the view from here, its white paint weathered, but then there was nothing but grass and, when that dropped away, bright blue sky.

“Have you always lived here?” Eddie dug his fork into his eggs.

“No, I grew up in the village. My cousin lives in that house now. I moved here with my sister when the last lighthouse keeper retired and I got the job. I’ve been here about five years now.”

“You have a sister?”

“Amy. She’s at university on the mainland, in Queensland.” I dug into my eggs. “What about you? Where are you from?”

“I was born in the UK,” Eddie said, “but I don’t remember it. We moved to the Hunter Valley when I was two, where a very boring childhood led me to compensating with other people’s interesting stories, and now I’m at the University of Sydney doing my thesis for my history Honours.”

“Hence your Henry Jessup diary.”

Eddie nodded.

“How many people did you tell about this diary?”

“Um,” Eddie said. He wrinkled his nose and his glasses shifted. “Just you, and John Coldwell from the museum. Oh, and I might have mentioned it on the trip over here.”

“So, the whole island basically. Young Harry Barnes is the biggest gossip on Dauntless.” I rubbed a hand over my forehead, trying to ease some of the tension there. “And did you tell them you actually had the diary with you?”

“Wait, you seriously think someone attacked me to try to get the diary?”

“Well, we’re not actually in the habit of attacking tourists just for the hell of it.”

“But it’s a diary . It’s not even worth that much. A couple of thousand dollars maybe, for people who are super into maritime history. Maybe more than that when my thesis is published, but not much more.”

“Eddie,” I said softly. “This is Dauntless. There is nothing more important to people here than the legend of Josiah Nesmith and the mutineers.”

Eddie raised his hand and touched the cut on his temple that extended into his hairline. He frowned, and I thought maybe he’d realised it at last: a Hawthorne on Dauntless was asking for nothing but trouble.

* * *

B efore we went into the village, I took some aspirin out of the medical chest for Eddie. I placed Henry Jessup’s plastic-wrapped diary carefully inside the medical chest before closing the lid and locking it.

Eddie watched me carefully.

Such a small book, but it weighed more than it should.