Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits - Donoghue [40]
"Still a good ten yards between them and the sailors," muttered Anna.
Sarah rested her hand on her cousin's bony shoulder, delicately, and Anna took hold of it with cold fingers and held tight.
The waves blocked the ladies' view; one moment it looked as if the Boat was almost upon the wrecked mast to which the two sailors clung, the next, as if the whole ocean had rushed between them. Sarah wanted to pray, to ask for these men's lives as a favour, but she knew that was sheer superstition. All she could do was wait on the Spirit.
"Ned's throwing a rope," yelped Anna. "One of the sailors has hold of it ... yes, they're hauling him in!"
The seaman looked like a waterlogged bag of grain as Fowell Buxton pulled him from the sea. The ladies watched the little Boat swing and dip under its new weight. "And the other?" Sarah peered into the salty wind.
"They've thrown him the line," said Anna. "It's no more than two yards away. What's wrong with the man?"
Despair, thought Sarah suddenly. All he had to cling to was this splintered mast. What could persuade him to let go of it? Why should he believe a skinny rope would save him?
"Cousin Fowell's kicking off his boots," Anna reported in a chilled voice.
"What?" Sarah stared, wiped her eyes to clear them.
"He's going in."
"No," said Sarah. "Not at his age. Surely he wouldn't dream—"
But Anna was already halfway down the beach, her wheels grinding through the sand. "No. Cousin, no!"
The men in the Boat gave no sign of hearing her shrieks. Fowell Buxton stood up in the wavering Boat for a moment, then dived over the side. The first wave ate him up.
"No!" Anna shrieked again, though she must have known he couldn't hear her.
Sarah was by her side. "He's a strong swimmer. I'm sure he's got a rope around his waist. The water's not too cold for October..."
Annas teeth were bared to the wind. "It's my fault. I called him a poltroon."
There was nothing to be said. All they could do was watch for Fowell's graying head between the blades of the waves.
He emerged at last where they weren't expecting him, on the other side of the mast. His soaked head was barely recognisable, more like a seal's than a man's. He was struggling to break the seaman's armlock on the wreckage. It looked more like a murder than a rescue. Anna muttered something Sarah couldn't hear. A gigantic gray wave came up and covered everything.
It could have been a matter of years, rather than minutes, later, when the ladies glimpsed Ned Sylvester leaning from the Boat to pull the two men in. Sarah kept counting heads, unable to believe.
The Boat's keel made a musical scraping on the shore. As the fishermen's wives surrounded the seamen to lift them out in blankets, Fowell Buxton staggered up the beach. "Ladies," he said, as if a little drunk, at a ball. Brine poured from his sleeves, and there was a twist of bladder wrack in his hair.
"Cousin Fowell," said Anna, with a hint of amusement.
Sarah wrapped him in her arms, not minding the wet. She started to cry.
"Now now, no need for that, my girl," he said. "Come, Cousin Anna, we've need of your tongue. Surely among all your twenty-odd languages there'll be one these poor foreigners understand."
She rolled her eyes at his exaggeration, but wheeled herself directly towards the huddled group around the seamen. One of the foreigners was being sick on the sand, retching up salt water. Anna addressed herself to the other, who was looking round him in a dazed way. After a few minutes, she called back to her cousins. "Good day," she said, almost laughing. "He says good day, or perhaps that it is a good day; I can't be sure."
Fowell was drying his head on a towel that one of the women had brought him. He cleared his throat with a wet roar now and wrapped a blanket round his shoulders. "Lift them into that barrow," he ordered, "and have them come up to the Hall. There's plenty of room in the barn and I'll send for someone from Cromer to nurse them."
But as the two men were being wheeled