Page 37 of Under the Stars

I remember the silence in the room, how delicate it felt against the fury of the storm beyond it. The surging of the ship against her anchor.

“How pure you are,” I said.

He shook his head.

I swung my legs free from the blankets. The air froze on my skin.

“Come here, Mr. Starkweather,” I said at last. “Let us warm each other.”

He made a soft, anguished noise and shook his head again.

I held out my hand. He stared at the tips of my fingers.

I don’t know if they trembled with fear or something else.

At last he rose and touched my knuckles, my joints.

I turned both my hands to trace the lines of his face—his brow, his cheekbones, the thick blades of his jaw.

Around the curve of each gigantic ear. As I drew my fingers over his skin, it seemed to me that the ugliness of his features melted into symmetry.

What was ungainly became perfect. I saw that the color of his eyes was true.

In the surge of another wave, he dropped to his knees next to the bed.

I don’t know if he was weeping or praying.

He clung to my hand. With his other hand he unlaced his shoes.

I lifted the blankets and he crawled inside to warm himself.

—

We slept in a kind of semiconscious dream. I remember how the ship surged beneath us, carried inexorably toward the rocky shore of Winthrop Island. Each time we climbed a wave and hurtled back down, I expected the jolt of impact, the crash, annihilation.

Every so often he stirred. He would shift about, trying to position his unwieldy body in some comfortable angle, and then quieten. Eventually I realized he was awake.

“Can you tell the hour?” I asked.

He untangled the blankets to find the pocket of his coat and his watch inside it.

He flipped open the cover with his thumb and held the face this way and that, trying to catch enough light to see the hands.

Just as he gave up, the ship’s bell sounded through the shriek of the wind, tolling the hour. I counted the strikes. So did he.

Eight bells, he said. Four o’clock in the morning.

I laid my head on his shoulder. “Aren’t we supposed to have struck the shore by now?”

“The officers will raise the alarm when the crisis is near,” he said.

“Perhaps the anchors will hold until sunrise.”

“Perhaps.”

I sat up. “Let’s go on deck.”

“No. It’s safer here, sheltered from the wind and ice.”

“I don’t care. I’d rather be swept away now than crushed to death when we wreck.”

“If we wreck, you have a chance to live. You can swim for shore.”

“And then you’ll arrest me.”

He found my hand and grasped it. “I put my faith in God. The truth will save you, Providence.”

“And if I would rather the truth died with me?”

Starkweather turned to face me. “Listen to me. God knows what’s written on your heart. He wants to redeem you. He has sent me here to serve you—”

“To persecute me—”

“To see that his will is done.”

“Isn’t that the same thing?”

“Providence,” he said. “Do you think I wish the slightest harm to even a single hair of your head? Do you think there’s even the smallest chance I would allow myself to be an instrument of your destruction?”

“Yes,” I said.

His other hand joined the first, gripping mine so hard between them I thought I should lose all sensation.

“From the moment I saw you on your chair in that hallway,” he said, “your suffering has been seared on my heart. If I have persecuted you, it’s only to discover the truth—the truth that will redeem you. ”

“How good of you.”

“Don’t you believe me? Everything—even the smallest act—is known to God. He has sent me to you, Providence. Not to persecute you, but to serve you.”

How his eyes yearned. If he could have poured out his faith through them and into mine, he would have filled me to the brim. How had I ever thought him ugly? His beauty tore me from within.

I knit my fingers with his. “Even if I could trust in God, I cannot trust in man. No jury will believe my story—a woman of small consequence, of low moral character, fallen in sin. They will want blood for what’s been done, and the blood of a woman like me can be sacrificed at so little inconvenience.

And you must believe me when I tell you that I would rather die tonight, upon this sea, than die by the hands of twelve upstanding men. ”

Starkweather removed one hand from the knot of our fingers and wiped beneath my left eye with his thumb.

Then he laid the palm like a cradle around the back of my head.

“And I swear to you, Providence, I will not suffer you to die. If it comes to pass that my whole purpose on this earth is contained in your fate, then so be it. I am content.”

“I don’t understand you,” I said.

He opened his mouth.

But his words drowned in the roar of the sea—the noise of some giant wave that crashed against the side of the ship and tossed us to starboard.

I flew from the bed and landed on the cabin floor. Starkweather scrambled after me.

As he reached my body, sprawled against the wall, a crack split the air, like the firing of a cannon. The ship swung wildly.

The main anchor, I thought. The cable had parted.

The Atlantic was loose on the water.