Page 42 of Under the Stars

Another wave slammed me against the ship’s side. I heard the crunch of wood. A wild scream. The undertow carried a man’s body past me and over the guardrail. I thought I heard him thump against the ship’s exposed side, before he fell into the boiling sea.

But already Starkweather was urging me ahead. In the seconds before the next wave hit, we reached the remains of the wheelhouse. Several men clung there. Ahead of us, another man cupped one hand around his mouth and hallooed to them, but his words disappeared into the howling wind.

He turned to us. It was the army captain—Callum. He waved his arm for us to follow him.

By now, my strength was sapped. For a day and a night, I had struggled to stand and to walk against the constant pitch of the ship—I had endured the cold, the strain, the hunger that gnawed me still, begging for nourishment for my own body and that of my child.

I could not hold this rail any longer. When I tried to move my arm in obedience to Captain Callum’s summons, the bones had turned to lead.

I lifted my head and met Starkweather’s furious gaze. He was shouting something at me—I couldn’t hear it.

In my head I saw Mr. Irving. His silver hair glinted with moonlight.

No—it was the ice that coated the metal in front of me.

The excruciating pain of my frozen fingers turned to numbness.

One by one, they uncurled from the railing.

Starkweather’s hands grasped each side of my waist and gripped me without mercy.

He waited until the next breaker throttled us, until the undertow had ebbed, then flung me clear of the side and into the sea.

In the next instant, he jumped after me.

—

It was Mr. Irving who had taught me to swim.

When summer came and heat draped the walls and furniture of the house in Cambridge, he had ordered me to pack our things and hired a carriage to convey us to the pretty coastal village of Westport, where he had taken a house for us not far from the ocean.

Until then—for my memory still bore the image of my mother’s pale and terrified face bobbing underneath the swift current of the Connecticut River—I had avoided any body of water larger than the copper tub in which I bathed each week.

I had not wanted to accompany Mr. Irving into the ocean, but he had insisted.

We went out early in the morning—so early that the rising sun had not yet touched the surface, and nobody was near to witness our naked bodies as he pulled me into this salt bath with both hands.

He had chosen a quiet day, a lethargic surf.

He had shown me how to keep myself afloat, how to stroke, while his strong hands clasped my waist. I won’t let you go, he told me, over and over.

In the security of his embrace, in the sweetness of the dead calm, my terror ebbed.

By the time the winds picked up and the surf turned unruly, I moved like a porpoise in the waves, and my antics so inflamed Mr. Irving that he carried me back to the sand and, in pummeling us both into a state of mutual oblivion, or perhaps during some other of our almost ceaseless acts of congress during those hot July weeks, planted this child inside me.

But the Westport sea had been—if not exactly warm—no worse than refreshing to my naked skin.

The water into which I now plunged shocked me with cold.

I sank and sank, until I thought I was surely buried forever.

Then some current bore me upward and my animal instinct for survival forced my legs to kick, my arms to reach for the surface.

Had my shoes remained on my feet, had Starkweather not torn away most of my skirt in his frantic efforts to free my legs, their weight would have drowned me.

As it was, I had scarcely poked my nose and mouth above water to gasp for air—once, twice—before a breaking wave gathered me up and hurled me toward the rocks.

I crashed hard against the granite. The surface was slippery with weed, but I dug my fingers into the slimy mass and held on by fistfuls until the undertow grabbed me and tore me away.

When the next wave carried me up, I was ready.

I gathered my strength and waited until the water reached its crest, then fixed my gaze upon the rock and stroked toward it. The impact knocked out my breath, but I found a handhold in some crevice and this time, when the undertow caught me, I clung tight and girded myself for the next wave.

In that next wave, I thought, I would make for the shore.

I suppose that period of waiting lasted no more than a few seconds.

The waves came hard and fast and relentless—there was no pause to them, no rest. Yet I can remember every detail about that moment as if it had lasted an hour.

I can recall each sensation, each beat in the succession of thoughts that crossed my mind.

I no longer felt my icy clothing. My head was full of brine—in my mouth, in my nose, in my sticky hair.

The pieces of the wreck crashed into my arms, my back, my legs.

From around me came the screams of men and I remember wondering why I heard no women—what had happened to all the women?

—and then I remembered the splintered wreck of the ladies’ saloon and the bloodcurdling screams that had died into the night.

I remember how I looked at the shore and tried to make out its features—where should I steer, what gap in the rocks gave me the best likelihood of survival?

I remember thinking— Starkweather. Where was he?

As if his proximity had conjured the thought itself, I turned my head and saw him.

—

I had offered Starkweather the company of my bed last night not because I desired him but because I knew we were about to die.

Why should we not comfort each other during our last moments on earth?

He had been married once—had known the heat of carnal joy—and I felt the strength of his longing in every pore as we lay together beneath the shelter of the blankets.

But he made no move to embrace me. He only bent his burly frame around mine while the fire of his virtue leaked through our clothes and skin to warm us both into sleep.

Strange, then, that I had woken with my nerves aflame.

It was as if our very chastity had drawn us into an intimacy more acute than congress itself—a nakedness of the spirit that awakened such yearning as I had never before known.

The dark glow of the lantern on his cheek pushed the breath from my chest. The curve of his shoulder, the knobs of his finger joints eclipsed all reason.

When I heard the words Your suffering has been seared on my heart in his voice like the earth itself, I felt as if he had transported me on his own back to the safety of some other world.

I nearly forgot that this man was my mortal enemy. That I could never rest easy so long as he walked the earth.

Now his body drifted lifeless in the water to my right.

Because it was dark, I couldn’t see his face until the rising sea lifted him to a new angle, which revealed the white gash on the side of his head—the exact spot where Mr. Irving’s own wound had opened his skull.

But Starkweather was not dead. His eyes blinked open, as if he was surprised to find himself alive, and his head poked up from the section of deck with which he had somehow become entangled.

At that instant, the rising wave took hold of both of us. I had time to stroke toward him but not to reach him before the sea tossed me toward the rocky shore like a toy it had tired of.

In the flood, I lost my own momentum and tumbled end over end, at the mercy of this torrent of salt water.

I don’t know how I landed on a stretch of pebble instead of rock, at the base of a steep hill.

I lay gasping, clawing at the shore to keep myself from being dragged out again, and when the undertow subsided, I crawled forward a few more yards, found a wet rock to which I could cling while the next wave crashed ashore.

Then I turned around and looked for Starkweather.

I saw him at once, lying among the rocks as the wave washed back out. His body began to rise and drift. He had lost consciousness—he moved neither his arms nor his legs. The sea held him in its teeth.

Again, I experienced those seconds as you might experience an ordinary hour. I had time to consider my choice—to save him, or to give him up to the sea.

If he died, I was free.

Outside the water, I began to shiver. The frozen wind howled along my skin and through my wet hair. I heard shouts, saw lights crawling down the hill.

I thought of his tears in my hair. I thought of his hands knit with mine, his body sheltering mine in the cold night.

I turned my head to the men who dropped from the ridge above me and screamed for help.