The Watery Part of the World - Michael Parker [21]
The wind increased as she neared his compound, which was a good hour’s walk from Whaley’s hut. It stood on a rise, fortified by a stockade; smoke rose from the chimneys of the half-dozen houses built on high stilts above the sand. She took shelter in a nearby wood for another hour, her shivering induced as much from fear as cold. The gate to the compound was open but in the time she spent hesitating she saw not a living soul. Occasionally a dog barked and overhead the gulls kept up their song, but here it sounded less desperate, as if they’d been sated, as if they had fed off the obvious spoils gathered by Daniels and his men. And why shouldn’t she too take what he had offered? If anyone approached her, all she had to do was string along a narrative of opulent nights at Richmond Hill. Leave the poor touched soul alone. Even if she were caught searching for her father’s papers, she would be pardoned, for she wasn’t in her right mind, and had she not already achieved impunity?
Breathing deeply, Theo picked her way out of the woods and into the stockade. One house, obviously Daniels’s, stood a story higher than the others and was twice as wide, regally shingled in shaggy dark shake. At the far edge of the compound, past a well and a shelter beneath which the ribs of several half-finished skiffs sat on scaffolding, she saw a vast pile of lumber. Splintered remains of shipwreckage. Someone else’s heartbreak, soon to be her salvation. But only as cover: the real bounty lay in the grandest of these modest, weather-beaten shacks.
The words that came in a steady rush as she moved past the lumber toward Daniels’s lodgings were not the words in her head, though both streams honored her father, the articulated one nonsensically, the unspoken one meant to convince her that the risk was for good reason. When I have those papers in hand, he will come for me. This is what she timed her steps to when midway across the yard she saw only a low brown streak and then she was in the sand, kicking at the animal with the leg not lodged between its teeth and then Whaley was beating the dog off with a piece of lumber and the dog was limping off bloody and snarling.
A throbbing in her left leg beneath the knee. With each breath it hurt more. Blood soaked the shawl he’d ripped from her shoulders to staunch the wound.
“I didn’t see it,” she said.
“You weren’t looking.”
“You followed me?”
“Just happened to be over here on my own business.”
She thanked him and he grunted, as if to say, don’t thank me, don’t even acknowledge me.
It wasn’t until he trudged through the sand to the pile of salvaged wood, grabbed a couple long poles, found a section of dry-rotted sail, fashioned a makeshift sling to take her home that she settled enough to ponder his arrival. She understood then: he loved her. Why else would he have followed? As he dragged her down island, she thought of how ignorant she had been of the signs. Her back to him, nauseous and sweating from her wounds, she collected and cataloged those signs in a manner so consciously calculated others would have thought her manipulative. But even before she arrived on this island, Theo had entertained a broader view on this subject, about which she had devoted many hours of contemplation while courting Joseph. Taking some small advantage of a man in love with you was, to her mind, allowable if not exactly noble. What was love, in its incipient flush, but delirium, temporary leave-taking, derangement of sense and emotion? What had it to do with another human being, their unique traits, attributes, qualities? It seemed to Theo that those afflicted might as well be under the influence of spirits. Certainly they weren’t