The Promise of Light (12 page)

“They’re leaving me,” Baldwin called from somewhere in the dark. “The bastards are leaving me!”

I waded onto the land. Foam boiled around my shoes as the tide pulled back.

The lifeboat lay stuck in the sand, filling with water as each wave barged over its stern. Men unloaded the crates, carrying them by their rope handles toward the dunes.

Now Baldwin was running toward me. “There he is! Get hold of him.”

“What for?” It was the man with the waterlogged sweater. He heaved a gun crate over the side and tried to drag it up the beach.

“He’s been throwing the bloody guns into the water!” Baldwin’s drenched trouser legs trailed along the beach, picking up sand. “I’ll fix your trolley now, Yank!” He grabbed hold of my arm. “I’ll fix you!”

Before I knew what I was doing, I had punched him in the face and my knuckles cut on his teeth. Then I realized I’d been waiting to do that for a long time.

Baldwin tipped back into the water. A wave curled over him.

“Help me here!” The man in the sweater couldn’t move the crate by himself.

I grabbed a hemp rope handle and began running with the man toward the dunes. The beach was wide and flat. My shoes filled up with grit and the drenched coat twisted around my legs. Salt burned at the back of my throat.

New thunder roared out of the night-black hills. I looked up into the sky, but saw only clouds hanging down.

The man in the sweater dove away into the dark. His end of the crate smacked me in the knee.

Pain slashed at my leg.

Then there was a shriek. A trunk of water sprayed up near the
Madrigal.

Men ran past, carrying rifles and crates. Their footsteps dug into the sand.

Another distant thud reached my ears. I could feel it—a shove against my chest as the earth shook underneath me. This time I knew what it was. I saw the flash of an artillery piece set up in a field above the far end of the beach.

Then came a sound like a hammer banging inside an oil drum. The
Madrigal
lit up in fire. A flicker of darkness followed and then more fire. Flames blasted out of its hull.

The man in the sweater rose up to his knees. He looked toward the hills.

I reached for my end of the crate. The sweater man grabbed the other end and we ran again toward the cover of the dunes. We scrabbled up the slope, which gave way underneath us. Our clawed hands gripped the razor grass.

Another explosion sent me down on my face. I let go of the crate and covered my head with my arms. I felt the detonation. It clapped at the air but was not close. When I raised my head, the sweater man was looking at me.

The man held out his hand. “I’m Tarbox.” He wore a glove of sand.

“Sheridan.” Grit crunched between my back teeth.

Tarbox beat at the crust of sand on his chest. “I should never have got out of bed this morning.”

“What’s going to happen to me?”

“Happen to you?”

“Yes,” The weight of my clothes dragged me down.

“Same things as will happen to us, unless you decide to lie there all morning. In that case you’ll be dead by sunrise.”

I watched his thick boots disappear through the razor grass. I tried to be calm and think straight. Tried to imagine my home, at least long enough to settle down my heart. But no pictures came. It was as if home had never existed, as if the island and Willoughby and Monahan and Harley had all bled into my mind through a dream. And now I was awake and they were gone and had never been there at all.

Another cannon blast. Then a thump and a hiss of water raining down. I turned my head, eyelashes flicking away grains of sand. They were aiming for the lifeboat now. I saw a ragged hole where the shell had come down on the beach. Men were running for the dunes.

Then I remembered my suitcase. I climbed to my feet and swayed under the weight of clothes. I started running.

“Where you going?” Tarbox pulled a rifle from a crate.

I jumped the last ripple of dune and headed out across the mud flats. The beach was huge and empty. The first smudge of dawn showed in the sky.

The cannon fired again and its flash jabbed at my eyes. I let myself fall, hands splashing down into a tide pool. The blast howled overhead.

Then I was running again.

Sand still rained back to earth as I reached the lifeboat. I found my suitcase under the forward seat and pulled it out.

As I turned to run again, I caught sight of the
Madrigal.
It burned under a patch of smoke, pressing against the clouds. Slithers of flaming gasoline threaded in and out of the waves. No voices came from the ship. No one cried for help. For a second everything seemed calm as I wheeled about, suitcase flying through the air.

Then I was sprinting. The damned suitcase was filled with water. My voice became a rhythm of obscenities.

Another cannon blast nudged at my ribs. I heard the shriek and a clap and knew from the sound that the shell had found the lifeboat. I craned my neck around and saw the lifeboat cartwheeling into the air. Smashed planks and oars skipped across the sand. Then the bow struck ground and a wave rushed in to claim it.

I slumped in the dunes and lay gasping with my face on the suitcase. Its leather was soggy and disintegrating. There was sand between my toes, in my crotch, against my chest and jammed into every crossed thread of my coat. Slowly my breathing grew steady. My eyes drifted back into focus.

Inland the sky showed lighter blue. Silhouetted against it was a man with a pair of binoculars. Others in trenchcoats crouched near him. They all carried rifles.

The crates were stacked nearby. Tarbox still rummaged through the rifles, as if to find the best one. Water dripped from his hair onto the polished stocks.

The
Madrigal
had started to sink. Detonations echoed inside it, more hammer strikes inside an iron drum. Still no sign of the crew. Pale rollers scudded up the beach.

A truck engine grumbled someplace in the shallow hills. It changed gears and appeared suddenly from behind a fold in the earth.

“Why haven’t they hit the Crossley yet?” The man in the binoculars stood on top of a dune. “They’re taking their damn time about it.”

Shivers trampled on my back.

Gunfire rattled in the hills. The fast clumping of a machine gun.

The truck’s brakes squealed. Its windscreen exploded in a shower of glass. The truck swerved into the ditch. Paint chips flew off the hood, leaving punctured bare metal beneath. Its engine raced and then quit. Bullets tore its canvas roof to shreds. Shouting. Three men jumped out of the back and as soon as they hit the ground, it seemed to fly up in their faces. Their bodies twisted and they fell.

The machine gun quit. Its firing echoed across the sand.

The truck’s burst radiator hissed steam.

The men around me slung rifles on their shoulders. They started moving out toward the road.

“Are you hit?” Tarbox looked down at me.

I stared up, still hugging the suitcase. “No. Not hit.”

“Grab a gun and come along.” He handed over a rifle, holding it out at arm’s length. “You’re probably just concussed is all. That’s the thing about being concussed. You don’t think you are, but you are.” He latched onto my lapel and pulled me to my feet. As Tarbox’s hands dug into the soaked wool, its black dye squeezed out and bled across his fingers.

The gun stock was slippery with oil. As I followed Tarbox through the dunes, I used the Springfield like a walking stick. In my other hand I held the suitcase. Water trickled from its seams.

A pistol shot came from the road. Then another and another.

Scattered beside the truck were the three soldiers. They wore khaki uniforms with black belts and hobnailed boots. Another body lay behind the steering wheel. All dead.

I stared at the bodies, forgetting the cold and the sand. It would have been easy to blind myself with panic. Easier than understanding where I was and what I had just done, lugging guns up a beach in the middle of the night. But I did understand and Baldwin was right. There would be no time for explanation, not to men who were sending down an artillery barrage to welcome me into the land.

Tarbox talked in whispers to the man with binoculars. The man looked at me, eyes narrowed. Then he walked over. He stopped a few paces away and turned his head a little to the side, as if listening for something. The buttons had popped off his trenchcoat. “Who the hell are you?” He stepped over a body.

“My name is Benjamin Sheridan.”

“Who?” The man barked in my face.

I said my name again.

The man pursed his lips and looked down for a moment. Thinking. Then his head snapped up. “You’re the one who was supposed to meet Fuller, aren’t you? We got a cable from Willoughby. You’re Arthur’s son, aren’t you?”

We both turned as Tarbox dragged a body across the road. The dead man’s head lolled back. Iron heelplates left white lines on the road.

“No looting the bodies now, Tarbox. Remember what I told you.”

Tarbox ignored him. He dropped the man and rummaged through his pockets, taking cigarettes and a brass-cased pocket watch.

I dug in my coat pocket, where I’d put Willoughby’s letter before I left my cabin. “Are you Mr. Fuller? I have a letter for Mr. Fuller.”

My gaze kept drifting back toward the dead man. I still couldn’t believe what I saw. But I was too afraid for my own life to feel the weight of sadness and shock that I knew I should have felt at seeing this.

Another explosion came from the ship. Deep and far-away rumblings that blew fire from its smokestacks. I closed my eyes against jets of color that flickered across the water and smudged orange on the wet sand.

“I’m Harry Crow,” the man said. “Your father said he’d come back, but I see that he sent you instead.” He took hold of my shoulders and spun me around to face the other men. “This is Arthur Sheridan’s son!” he shouted to them.

Their talking died away. The men stood staring now. A smell of spilled gasoline seeped from the truck. Pebbles of rain slowly darkened the road.

I looked from face to face, struggling to focus through the salt that burned my eyes.

CHAPTER 6

“What do you mean you didn’t know about the guns?” Crow’s face stayed hidden under a short-brimmed wool cap. His lips were chapped and bloody.

I held my collar to my throat. My inner thighs were chafed raw from the damp trousers. “All I know is that I was supposed to get off the boat in Galway and meet a man named Justin Fuller. That’s all Father Willoughby told me.”

I had to concentrate to understand Crow when he spoke. I’d heard accents clipped with Irish before, but nothing like the singsong of the way Crow twisted words. It was a lulling voice, a voice for lulling children to sleep at night.

Cold rested like wet towels around my bones. Often I turned to look back down the road, expecting to see khaki-coated soldiers, bristling with knives and guns. I waited for the gravel road to shudder underneath me as artillery fired in the distance. But the fields spread out empty and thick with grass. In the hollows, reeds stretched from soil so dark brown and damp it looked as if it had been soaked in tea. I wondered what happened to Baldwin. Maybe he didn’t get up after I knocked him into the water. I might have killed him. I had never hit anyone before, and it made me a little sick to think of how much I’d enjoyed paying Baldwin back for his days and days of bearbaiting.

We had been walking for an hour already. The sun was up, but mostly it stayed muffled in the clouds. Harry Crow had walked beside me all the way. His heavy, shapeless boots made him look as if he had just wrapped pieces of dead cow around his feet. Men left the group in twos and threes, heading out across the fields. Crow said that these were the ones who had to show up for work on time, so no one would know where they’d been. Soon the fifteen men were down to eight.

I didn’t try to make talk. It took all my strength just carrying my suitcase and the two rifles I’d been given. Again and again, I tried to think of what to do next. It was like striking sparks from a flint to start a fire, but no fire came and no comfort and no plan.

Hedges thick with brambles lined the road. Where the road ran next to a field, thick walls blocked them off. The wall stones were almost flat, patched with lichen and moss. It looked as if thousands of books had been stacked across the countryside and painted dark grey. In places, the walls had collapsed. Sheep with gnarly wool and black faces gathered at the openings to watch us pass. Their tiny round droppings speckled the road.

On the ocean side, the land was bordered by cliffs. Headlands jutted out into the water. Waves smashed into the rock and spray unraveled in the air.

Crow fingered the brim of his cap. His nails were lined black with dirt. “Perhaps Willoughby didn’t know about the guns, either. It doesn’t matter now, though, does it?”

I thought about turning myself in to the police. I imagined a place noisy with typewriters and people who would listen. But the picture of the dead soldiers swept that aside. I had come into the country illegally and that meant the only way out would also have to be illegal. I couldn’t do it without help. Couldn’t do anything in this place without help. My money was no good. My clothes were no good. With my accent, I might as well have been wearing a flag. I was afraid to tell Crow about the blood test. From the way Crow treated me, I knew it carried weight to be Arthur Sheridan’s son. If I told him the truth, I worried he might throw me aside.

My life had become so fragile. It seemed as if the slightest pressure would shatter my bones.

“I was sorry to hear about your mother passing on. Willoughby wrote us a letter about it.” Wind skimmed over the hedge tops, flattening grass in the fields. Sheep huddled for warmth. “And how’s your old dad?”

“He’s dead. That’s why I’m here. To scatter his ashes, Mr. Crow.” The cold had a grip on my jaw.

Crow’s fingers spread and rustled through his beard. “I was afraid of it when I saw you. I wondered what news you were bringing. And how did he die?”

“Blood poisoning.”

“I suppose that’s as good a way as any.” It looked as if Crow had spent his life outside. Wind had cut grooves in his face and his eyes stayed narrowed, almost shut, as if walking into a storm wind that only he could feel.