“They’re singing ‘Happy Birthday,’” Louis said, bringing me back to reality. “Do you think there’ll be a cake?” The smooth skin between his eyebrows wrinkled as he looked at me. “What’s the matter? Your eyes are all funny.”
“Nothing,” I said, twisting my mouth into a smile. “It’s just the sun making them water. Come on, let’s go and find Mummy.”
Merle was surprised to see me—and horrified when she heard where the boys had been. “Louis! I told you not to go any farther than the fish cellar!”
“It’s Ned’s fault,” Louis said. “He wanted to go and find Miss Alice.”
“I’m sorry,” Merle said. “I didn’t mean for them to foist themselves on you.”
“It doesn’t matter—honestly. We had a lovely time, didn’t we, boys?” I glanced down, but Louis was gone, heading toward a woman who was dishing out slices of birthday cake.
“Don’t you want any cake, Ned?” I said.
“Will you come with me?” He fixed me with his melting, dark eyes.
I turned to Merle, embarrassed that he’d asked me instead of her.
“I think you’ve got an admirer,” she whispered, smiling.
It started to rain as I made my way back along the cove to the boathouse. I’d planned to sit outside and read, but there was no chance of that. Instead I curled up on my makeshift bed with Frenchman’s Creek.
I didn’t want to finish the story, but I couldn’t put it down. When I reached the last page, I sat with the book still open in my lap, mulling over the ending. The main character had paid a terrible price for the freedom she sought. She was brave and beautiful and had fallen in love with a kindred spirit in Cornwall. But she had a husband in London—and two young children, whom she didn’t think twice about leaving with a servant while she set off on a dangerous voyage with her pirate. Did I like her? As Sister Anthony, I would have said no. But now? I wasn’t sure.
There was a black-and-white photograph of the author inside the dust jacket. She was a dainty woman, not much older than me, with gentle, pensive eyes. The biography beneath the image said that she was married with three children and lived by the sea in Cornwall. I wondered if, like Merle, the war had separated her from her husband. Frenchman’s Creek was set three centuries ago, but I couldn’t help thinking that the author must have experienced the feelings she’d written about, of being trapped in a loveless marriage and longing to escape a life that was narrow and confined.
I closed the book and put out the lamp. Outside the rain was still lashing down. The noise of the wind screaming up the estuary was far louder than the enemy planes I’d heard a few nights ago. I fell into a restless sleep, full of wild and troubled dreams. The only one I remembered when I woke up was a scrambled version of the story I’d been reading. The pirate had Jack’s face and the woman had Merle’s. And as I watched them sail away, I was holding the hands of two children, who were crying. But the children were not English. They were African.
The storm was still raging the next day. Waves whipped up the estuary, spitting foam onto the beach, making the sand look as if it had a covering of snow. Then the rain came again, washing it all away.
Returning from the farm, the path down through the valley was so slippery I had to grab at tree trunks to stop me from falling. The bark of the giant ferns felt rough and hairy, like the hides of the cows I’d been milking. Even with the rain lashing down, the valley was a magical place. The perfume of the rhododendrons and camellias was intensified, and the volume of water in the stream amplified the trickle into a symphony of sound. I stood there for a moment, sheltering under the unfurling leaves of a giant rhubarb. It was like being in a green cathedral. I shut my eyes and breathed in the cool, scented air. I felt closer to God in this place than I had in a long time.
The next morning the weather was no better. The rain blurred the horizon, turning sky and sea into a curtain of slate gray. I wrapped myself in a tarpaulin sheet that smelled of fish and started up the muddy path. It was a good thing my foot was no longer giving me any pain; otherwise I doubt I’d have made it to the farm.
I could hear the Land Girls long before I reached the milking shed. They were back from their Easter break and were catching up with each other’s escapades, raucous laughter punctuating every other sentence.
“Good morning!” I had to shout to be heard above the clamor.
A sudden hush descended. Edith had been in the middle of describing what she and a Spitfire pilot had got up to in a bus shelter outside a dance hall in Birmingham. Apparently she considered it too racy for my ears.