Anne Perry's Silent Nights_ Two Victorian Christmas Mysteries - Anne Perry [65]
The last man, Brendan Flaherty, was carrying a body in his arms. Others reached forward to help him, and he staggered up the sand to lay it gently beyond the sea’s reach. Father Tyndale clasped his shoulder and shouted something, lost in the wind and roar of the water, then bent to the body.
Emily looked at the villagers’ faces as they stood in a half-circle, the yellow flares of the lanterns under-lighting their features, hair wet and wind-whipped, eyes dark. There was pity in their knowledge of death and loss, but more than anything else she was touched again by the drenching sense of fear.
She looked down at the body. It was that of a young man, in his late twenties. His skin was ashen white, a little blue around the eye sockets and lips. His hair looked black in this lantern light, and it clung to his head, straggling across his brow. He was quite tall, probably slender under the seaman’s jacket and rough trousers. Above all, he was handsome. It was a dreamer’s face, a man with a world inside his head.
Emily wanted to ask if he was dead, against her will imagining how it had happened, but she dreaded the answer. She looked one by one at the ring of faces around her. They were motionless, gripped by pity, and more than that, by horror.
“Do you know him?” Emily asked, a sudden lull in the wind making it seem as if she were shouting at them.
“No,” they answered. “No …”
And yet she was certain that they were looking at something they had half expected to see. There was no surprise in them at all, no puzzlement, just a dreadful certainty.
“Is he dead?” she asked Father Tyndale.
“No,” Father Tyndale answered. “Here, Fergal, help me get him up on my shoulder, and I’ll carry him to Susannah’s. We’ll need to get him warm and dry. Maggie, will you stay with him? And Mrs. Radley, no doubt?”
“Yes, of course,” Emily agreed. “We’re by far the closest, and we have plenty of room.”
When they reached the house Susannah must have been up and looking out of the window, because she opened the door before anyone knocked. The young man was carried upstairs, awkwardly, booted feet scraping and numb hands knocking against the banisters. He was laid on the floor and the women asked to leave. Susannah had already put out a nightshirt, presumably one of Hugo’s she had kept. Emily wondered if she had kept all his clothes.
There were no sheets on the bed, only blankets. “Shall I—” Emily began.
“Blankets are warmer,” Susannah cut across her. “Sheets later, when the blood’s flowing again.” She looked down at the young man’s face and there was sadness in her own, and fear, as if something long-dreaded had happened at last.
Then they excused themselves and went to get bowls of hot soup for the men, and all the dry woolens and socks they could find. The men would all have to go back again. There could be more people washed up, dead or alive.
The rest of the night Emily spent taking turns with Maggie O’Bannion to watch the young man, rub his hands and feet, change the oven-warmed stones wrapped in cloths in the bed, and looking for any signs of returning consciousness. No one had any idea how much water he had swallowed, and there were dark bruises and abrasions on his chest, legs, and shoulders, as if he had been driven up against the wreckage again and again.
“I can’t manage two of you to nurse,” Maggie said tartly when Susannah tried to argue about staying to help. “Nor can Mrs. Radley. She’s come to visit you, not to watch you waste yourself away to no purpose.”
Susannah obeyed with a bleak smile, her eyes meeting Emily’s before she turned away.
“Maybe I shouldn’t have spoke harshly to her.” Maggie looked guilty. “But she’s—”
“I know,” Emily responded. “You did the right thing.”
Maggie smiled briefly and bent to wrap some hot stones in flannel. But Emily had seen the tension in her, the tight shoulders and the quick averting of