Crossing Over - Anna Kendall [13]
The inside of the cabin was dark, lit only by a single lantern on a small table. Two people sat in wet, bloody clothes. One had a crude bandage wrapped around his temples; he sat with his head in his hands, moaning. The other was a woman.
She was neither young nor old, with gray streaking the salt-crusted hair that dripped onto her torn gown. Her face was swollen, either from her battering in the sea or from tears. Grief dulled her eyes. Enfield thrust me before her on my knees.
“This, Mistress Conyers, is what killed your husband and wrecked the Frances Ormund—this!”
She looked at me. I steeled myself for the blow. Instead she said with a kind of hopeless wonder, “But he’s just a boy.”
“Worked with the wreckers, mistress. The foulest vermin there is . . . He’ll hang with the other.”
Her brow furrowed painfully. I could see that she hadn’t taken it in yet: the wreck, her husband’s death, her own freakish survival. She was like those newly arrived in the country of the Dead, bewildered by where she found herself, unable as yet to make sense of this new terrain.
She said, “How old are you, boy?”
All at once I found my voice. I wanted to live. Two nooses swung outside, and I was not yet ready to dwell in that other country. And I looked—so skinny, so underfed—younger than I was, despite my height. I fell to my knees.
“Eleven, mistress. And I did not wreck the ship! My uncle brought me there—he made me come—I didn’t know—I didn’t know!”
Enfield snarled, “A blubbering coward, as well as a wrecker.” He seized me, but I tore myself from his grasp and stayed on my knees.
“Please, mistress, I swear to you—I did not know! And my aunt was there, too, my uncle killed her as well—look for the body! It’s skinny and frail. . . . She didn’t enter the sea, she wasn’t killed by anyone coming ashore—she was my mother’s sister! ”
Again Enfield grabbed me, this time much harder. But the dazed, grieving widow raised her hand. “No, wait, please . . . please.”
“Mistress, he’ll say anything to get himself off! He’s lying!”
“Was . . . was . . .” It seemed hard for her to weave her thoughts. “Was there a woman’s body on the beach?”
I thought Enfield would lie, but somewhere amid the vengeance in him also lay truth. As it did in my story, if he but knew it. After a long pause, he said, “There was.”
“Murdered? ”
“Her head was bashed in,” Enfield said reluctantly. “But this bastard might have done it himself!”
“No,” I said. “Aunt Jo was the only one ever kind to me.”
And now, when she was dead, I saw that this, too, was true. My aunt had never protected me from Hartah, no. But she had shared with me what food she had. She had told me to run from this very clearing. She had lost her life coming down to the beach to tell me, yet again, to run. “Roger! Go! Go now!”
And I had treated her with rage, with contempt, because I was too afraid of Hartah to direct those feelings at him.
Tears pricked my eyes. For Aunt Jo, for my lost mother, for myself. Then shame flooded me—fourteen was too old to cry! Eleven would have been too old to cry. All I could do was hang my head, but I knew both Enfield and Mistress Conyers had seen.
She said wearily, “Let him live. He’s just a child.”
“He is not! This is an act and he a coward, a lying—”
“Let him live. It is my right.”
Enfield bellowed, pulled me upright, and dragged me outside. He was not going to listen to her; he was going to hang me. But all he did was hold me fiercely and force me to face the great oak.
One noose dangled, empty, from a high tree. The other lay around the neck of the yellow-haired youth. His whole body trembled and his eyes rolled wildly. He shouted something, but the words made no sense. Three men on the other end of the rope pulled, and the young wrecker was jerked off his feet into the air.
He went on jerking for what seemed forever, kicking desperately. The men knotted the far end of the rope around another trunk. The rope chafed the tree bark as the hanging man struggled for air, his face distorted