Hans shifted in his sleep and I looked down at his face, lit by the moon. Christiana had often mentioned that she thought him handsome and so I supposed it for fact. It was true that I liked the way the moonlight lay on his skin, the way it made shadows of the depression in his throat, the corners of his eyes, his temple.
He might have been my husband.
I leaned down over Hans until I could see the flicker of his eyelids, the hairs on his top lip. I pressed my mouth to his.
Nothing. I could sense the give of his lips, feel his breath exhale into my own, but nothing quickened within me and I knew instantly that I was deeply grateful in every coil of my gut that I was dead and would not have to marry him.
To be happy to be dead! What would I have wanted instead? What else could I have hoped for, if not marriage?
The answer came to me in a ghost-beat of my own blood.
I could not lie to such a witness of stars. The thought that I might have been married to Hans unnerved me because I had already given myself to another.
Thea.
I wanted Thea. I still wanted her.
The sudden understanding of that coursed through me and solidified into both shame and exhilaration.
This was what I had sensed in myself. This was what I had wanted.
It was an impossibility.
And yet, Thea had kissed me, and I had felt affirmation in my bones and blood and the wick of my soul had caught flame, had burned bright.
Yes, this. Yes, this.
I rose and made my way down the hatchway and into the bow. I found Thea’s berth. She was asleep, had tucked her hands up under her chin, and I felt my love for her rise up in me, filling me until I felt steady and sure and ballasted against the world.
It had been one thing to feel without understanding, but it was another to feel love and to know it for what it was.
‘Thea.’ I said her name for the solace of it. ‘Thea, better your face than the face of God. Better your love, better your grace.’
And I wondered if she loved me as I loved her.
I saw it then. The pillow overcover she had almost cast into the sea. In the light of the hatchway lamp, I saw that she had finished the Schlafe wohl. And when I picked it up, I saw that next to my initial she had added her own.
There was a time when I wandered in grief. I left the cupped palm of the new village and its familiarity because I felt myself betrayed. That time changed me. I saw things I would never have seen in my lifetime, had I lived. I saw things that I know my own parents will never see, that they may not, to this day, truly know about.
So much of what I encountered in those years was cold and broken. But sometimes I saw things that led to a deeper understanding of myself. Sometimes I stumbled across things that made bonfires of my heart.
I once encountered a love like mine. I had fled to the stringybark forest upon the ranges. It had not been by design. The Tiers, as I knew this place, surrounded the track that led, eventually, to the plains. At the time I was following any path that promised distance. The stringybarks were dense, the ground so steep in places it was impossible to walk down the hillside. A place of shadows, where foresters lived and cut lumber.
Darkness fell and I lost the path. I was not looking where I was going. I stumbled and fell, and moved from tree to tree, trunk to trunk. When I saw the glow of a small cabin in the forest, I nearly wept for the relief of light. The door was open. I stood in its gap.
Inside there were two men eating supper straight out of a cooking pot. Both were lean and wiry with muscle, and that, together with their youth and the way they ate, hunger bringing their mouths close to the pot’s rim, reminded me powerfully of Matthias. I was suddenly buckled with longing for my twin. It was never my habit to stay with strangers. Not even during that time of exodus, when loneliness made me yearn for oblivion, did I decide to linger at bedsides. I watched people, of course I did, but at a distance. But these two men, these two beautiful men, manifested Matthias in my mind in a way that compelled me to stay. I curled up by their fire and watched them finish their meal. One of them, addressed by the other as Tom, washed their cooking pot and spoons, whistling as he did so. He was shorter than his companion, who was slightly rangier, with thick scar tissue across the back of his neck, near his hairline. He had very dark, very beautiful eyes.
‘Will you have a drink, Tom?’ he asked, getting up from his seat and going to the windowsill, where a bottle stood in the corner. He picked it up. He was missing the tip of his little finger.
The shorter man nodded, turning and smiling as the other approached him, uncorking the bottle. I watched as, instead of pouring a drink in the mugs waiting on the table, the taller man gently brought the neck of the bottle to his friend’s mouth. Tom drank and something in the way they looked at each other sounded through me like a bell, so that when the bottle was pulled away and set on the table, and the two men drew closer and kissed, I did not feel anything but recognition. I had not known such things were possible in life. Even when, on the ship, I had understood my feelings for what they truly were, I had not imagined that I would ever see such a thing reflected back to me in the lives of others.