“Oh. Well.” Now Vida found herself in the curious position of not wanting to let go of her anger. In vulnerable times, anger could be a kind of fortress. And yet she couldn’t get a grip on that anger, and it was gone before she could help it, and then she was laughing, too. “You think I’m ridiculous?”
“A little. But you’ve taken off clothing that could only serve you in a fancy ballroom, so I must admit that you are slightly less ridiculous now.”
“I hope I have not become too serious,” she said. Then she turned to the cluster of ladies who she knew were still staring at her and waved theatrically.
“No.” Sal grinned, from where he lay on the sand. “Not too serious, either.”
And Vida flung herself down beside him, folded her arms up behind her head, and allowed herself to laugh. He began laughing, too. The ocean was back to its old way—peacefully lapping at the sand—and the sun was in their eyes. After a while, the laughter died out. She brushed the sand from her bloomers, picked up a tall, forked stick, and wrapped her corset around it to form a cushion where Sal could rest his weight. She offered Sal her hand, pulled them both to their feet so he could try the makeshift crutch.
“It’s good,” he said after a few steps.
Vida, afraid he was just saying this to make her feel better, changed the subject. “We’ll never get shelter built by sunset.”
“No.”
“What will we do?”
“Before the light goes, we’ll have Jack lead the others back to the cave. They’ll sleep there again tonight. You and I will build a fire and we’ll take stock of what we have and make a plan. We’ll keep the fire going all night in case there is a ship passing in the night, and we’ll take turns sleeping. In the morning, we’ll start making new huts, on higher ground this time.”
Those top-drawer people—once capable of talking animatedly for hours on such riveting topics as cherry galettes and fancy dress balls; now the most horrendous gluttons for shade—would surely disapprove of this arrangement. But Vida could not bring herself to see anything wrong in what he proposed. The only right thing that mattered was how to survive another day. She was embarrassed to find that her greatest wish at that particular moment was for Sal to say again that he no longer found her ridiculous. To tell her how brave she had been. But she could see the irony in this desire—she was ridiculous to want him to reassure her she wasn’t ridiculous—so she went off in a hurry to see what else could be scavenged.
“Miss Hazzard,” he called after her.
“Yes?” She shielded her eyes from the glare of the sun.
Though she couldn’t really make him out through the overwhelming brightness, she sensed the way his lips curled up at the corners. “You aren’t who I thought you were at all.”
Twenty-Two
In the days that followed, Vida discovered that she was not precisely who she’d always thought she was, either. Her heart ached for Fitz, and when she closed her eyes she felt his brilliant blue gaze on her, and remembered the promise of their first, wild meeting.
But she refused to give in to despair, and worked day by day to keep herself and the others safe and hopeful.
Without trying she had become an early riser, a fact that would have shocked her old friends. Every morning she was up before the others, and would walk along the rocky peninsula near their new encampment—the one that separated the small cove and the long beach—to the highest point out at the end, where she’d climb up and have a look down into the clear turquoise waters below. She would leap, dive. How her blood charged when she sailed in the air! Her body cutting through the surface like a knife, her skin shocked by the cool water, arcing through the deep until she couldn’t stand it anymore, and would emerge into the upper air breathless and glad.
For another thing, she had become quite freckled and brown. It had been one thing to be flushed pink all the time—that was still a version of the alabaster complexion she had protected under broad sun hats and pretty tasseled parasols on the manicured lawns of San Francisco—but now her forearms were brown as California hills in a drought year.
And, for a third, she had become quite obsessed with finding stones that had broken open in such a way that they could be used to whittle the ends of sticks to a lethal point. She—Vidalia Marin Hazzard, who had once felt it necessary to have a hundred different pairs of shoes—searched, rabid as an American shopping for a season’s worth of clothes in Paris, for stones with a clean, hard break.
As she swam back around the rocks toward the beach she would dive down and peek into the underwater grottoes seeking any useful thing—razor-edge shells, fish bones to make hooks out of, the places where fish were likely to be in frenzy. Although Sal had let her use his pocketknife, the blade had been worn dull by their time on the island.
It was the sharp edge of a recently halved white stone that proved crucial in the making of her own spear.
Around the hour the girl she used to be would have been welcoming Nora into her bedroom with a tray of strong tea and fresh pastries, and gossiping about the various intrigues of last night’s party, Vida put down this stone and tested the tip of the stick she had carved into a spear against her index finger.
“Oh!” she exclaimed, and frowned at the drop of blood beading on her skin. Then an expression of pure joy suffused her face. She scrambled to her feet and went to find Sal.
When they had first crashed onto these shores, she had been told she couldn’t help, and then she had been assigned to search for kindling all day. Now it was Flora Flynn and Mrs. Charles Brinkley who collected firewood, and Vida put her mind to matters of life and death. Thus it had been since the night after the storm.
That night Vida and Sal had sat by the fire until dawn, keeping the flames high enough that a raft in the dark would see them and know where to paddle toward. They had discussed many things—how much “lumber” had been lost, and what sort of shelters they could build with what was left. They agreed that this time their shelters should be by the rocks over the cove—the land was higher there and it would make a better lookout and was more likely to survive another storm. They discussed, too, the best ways to collect coconuts, and who should have the benefit of their milk first. And they wondered what there was of the island, beyond that first band of forest, beyond the waterfall, over the ridge. Whether the wild yams could be cultivated for a greater yield. What else they didn’t know about their home, for good or bad, which might now be their home for a long time yet.
But mostly they had talked about Fitzhugh.
Neither dwelled on the likelihood of his survival. Vida was afraid that if she acknowledged how impossible it would have been to live through weather like that on the open ocean, she might actually do him some harm—that whatever remote chance of his having lived through it might be dashed by careless speech. But they weren’t hopeful, either. Vida kept waiting for Sal to say something like “The great Fitzhugh Farrar would never succumb to a watery grave.”
But he didn’t.
Instead he spoke of how Fitzhugh had been when they first met—that frightened, eager, sickly child. Sal’s father had been a bosun with the Farrar Line, and had been killed in an accident involving the engine of one of Farrar’s Atlantic steamers. Sal’s mother had died on the day of his birth, and so it was that at nine years old he was all alone in the world, and old Winthrop Farrar decided that he owed it to the boy’s father to give him a livelihood. At first this just meant keeping the nervous, easily fatigued Fitz company, but when Sal told tales of all the far corners of the world he’d traveled with his father, and all he had learned of navigating by the stars, or steering around a storm, Fitz became less melancholy, and it was decided that Sal would be in charge of teaching the young heir to be brave. Once Sal had taught him all he knew—as they were just becoming men, then—he was given a budget to hire every sort of trapper, sailor, cartographer, wrangler, so that they could learn how to live by their wits and survive outside the safe, walled cities of man. How
to live close to the land. Fitzhugh became a different person with Sal’s companionship. He had invented a whole new self to inhabit.
As the night passed, as they fed the fire twigs, Vida and Sal kept Fitz alive by talking about him. In the morning, there had been no sign of the raft that had sailed into stormy seas. But, having learned of all the transformations that Fitzhugh was capable of, Vida knew that she, too, could change.
And she had changed. It shocked her how much and how quickly. Even Dame Edna had remarked on it—said she wouldn’t have minded having Vida along with her when she followed armies to report on battles.
Vida still looked out at the horizon as though Fitz might be there, but she had begun to accept that he probably never would be.
Three days had passed. She was hopelessly freckled. She had become accustomed to walking on bare feet. She had begun to wear her own fate like a light summer slip.
Her fate, as it turned out, seemed to involve quite a deep interest in sticks and stones.
And here she was now, rushing to Sal to show him how perfectly she’d whittled a stick into a spear.
“Let me see.” Sal grinned as he examined the fine point in the light. He was crouching by the fire, where they kept a few embers going through the day, and weaving a fish trap out of dried vines.
Vida had not known how badly she wanted his approval until the long pause that followed. He examined her spear and said nothing. “Well?” she demanded.
“It’s good.” His dark eyes met hers as he handed it back. “What will you do with it?”
“Me?” She stared at it in puzzlement. Somehow she had thought she was making it for him, or for Jack, who had once been an ordinary seaman on the Princess, to do something manly with. What exactly that might be she couldn’t say. She went on staring at it, but the spear refused to proclaim its fate.
“You’ve made it,” he said. “Surely you know?”
She was on the verge of making something up—lest she look a complete fool—but then she noticed Camilla passing by the camp, her face a little wan. The happy-seeming Camilla she had known for a few days had gone away with the big wave and the disappearance of Fitz. She was like a ghost again. Although she had, like some of the other ladies, followed Vida’s lead and removed the aubergine top layer of her skirt—such fabrics were crucial to maintaining the privacy between huts—and given up on wearing what was left of her slippers, still she wore layers of petticoat, and the fitted bodice of what had once been her dress.
“Where’s she going?” Vida asked.
“We were right to build here—it’s the highest, flattest ground—but she’s taken it hard.”
“Oh!” Vida was ashamed of her thoughtlessness. “Of course—the grave.”
“Yes. It’s close to where we buried her husband. She might seem like a hypocrite. But she loved him. Whatever games they played they all played; they were her family.”
“Oh.”
“Have you noticed her going off like that?”
“No . . .” But even as she said it she knew it was a lie, that in fact she had seen Camilla doing this at least twice before. “I’ll follow,” Vida said. “See where she goes.”
It was not, Vida decided, that she was an entirely new person. She was still a little jealous of Camilla, afraid that her connection with Fitz was deeper, and more real, than Vida’s own. But she knew that was absurd. And anyway, she thought that Fitz would have liked it if they were friends now.
As she moved through the jungle, the sounds of the camp dwindled—the children’s cries, the constant susurrus of roofs being thatched—and the cawing of birds, the buzz of insects overwhelmed her ears. It was not until she had traveled a distance that she noticed how firmly she gripped the spear. For some moments she was lost. Then she saw the white splash of Camilla’s petticoat, heard the sound of falling water. They were at the pool. The spray rose up, catching the bright midday light.
So, Camilla was only here to bathe, Vida thought. She had worried for nothing.
But as soon as Vida’s shoulders relaxed, she saw that Camilla had no intention of stopping. She was climbing up the sheer, rocky side of the waterfall, where little green sprouts clung to small patches of soil. The way was steep, and Camilla used her hands to ascend. Vida’s first thought was how scratched and dirty Camilla’s hands would get, how ripped and ruined her petticoat. But then without thinking she followed, testing the ground as she went, never trusting her footing.
Despite her melancholy, Camilla set a determined pace, and by the time Vida reached the high ridge a sheen of sweat covered all her skin, and her chest was dry, desperate for breath. For a moment Vida had almost forgotten about the other woman. She’d had to concentrate while they scrambled upward and had stopped noticing much. But now they emerged into the open air of a vertiginous height. On one side, the mountain rose up to the peak from which the stream trickled and grew into the waterfall. On the other, the ridge jutted in the direction of the open sea. Before them the little plateau curved and fell away to a verdant valley. For the first time, Vida saw the far side of the island—beyond the valley was more jungle, more hills, and another rocky pinnacle beyond which lay beaches and the same ocean—that watery plain that continued on in every direction.
“Wild, isn’t it?” Camilla said.
Vida startled, surprised that Camilla had known she was being followed. She took a thoughtless step that sent pebbles cascading off into the nothing below.
“Careful,” Camilla said. When Vida saw the play of her smile she knew that she had misinterpreted her old rival’s mood.
“I was going to say the same thing to you,” Vida whispered.
“Oh.” Camilla leaned her head back from her body and assessed Vida. “I know what you thought. It’s not that. We can’t all be you, you know—daring and resourceful. But I know our situation is different now. There’s no time for moping. Still, I loved him. I like coming up here, seeing this, and thinking how he would have loved it, too.”
Vida wasn’t sure whether Camilla was talking about Carlton or Fitz, and for a moment of burning discomfort she tried very hard not to want to know. Then she realized it didn’t matter. “Who wouldn’t?” she whispered.
“Oh—plenty wouldn’t. That Mrs. Brinkley person you’re on the wrong side of, for one. She would have fainted away to see where we really are. But I like it.”
“What’s that way?” Vida asked, pointing toward the peak.
Camilla’s eyes went in the direction that Vida had indicated, and when she looked back at her friend her own gaze shone with fear and wonder. “I don’t know.”
“Don’t you want to know?”
“It’s so high that way!”
“Yes, exactly—we’ll be able to see everything.”
They hesitated in nervous excitement, and then Vida put down her spear.
They went, Vida first and Camilla close behind, clinging to the vines until there was no more vegetation, until it was just rock and they had to use their hands as much as their feet to reach the peak. The air became cooler, their breath labored. In a little while they ran out of mountain. They were so high they might have been upon the throne of a goddess, the place where some pagan deity went to rest and observe her worshipers.
“I’m dizzy,” Camilla whispered.
“Me too,” Vida said. But she wasn’t. The atmosphere had a different quality here—it was less dense with moisture, with salt; it had a coolness that she felt at the roots of her hair. Her heart was beating steady and clear as a church bell. She took Camilla’s hand and said, “Don’t worry.”
“If you say so.”
“Don’t you think it was all worth it, just to see this?”
Camilla murmured uncertainly. But Vida thrilled to this rare vantage, to see all the world roll slowly down, down, to the shimmery carpet of the sea as it unfurled onward to infinity. “Should we go back?” Camilla asked.
Vida agreed that was probably best. But she hesitated. And in that moment of hes
itation she noticed something she had not seen before.
In the grassy open space way below were a pack of dark, wild creatures chasing each other in circles, rutting and turning on fast, sturdy legs. Pigs! She could scarcely credit the existence of yet more life, just beyond the summit, but there it was.
“Come, please, if you like me at all,” Camilla was saying as she little by little scaled backward down the mountain.
“I do,” Vida replied gallantly, and followed her.
In fact she liked—no, loved—everyone and everything.
All the sprouts and weeds and pebbles and trees and birds and eggs and shells and grains of sand and flowery smells, and all the beings big and small, near and far, hideous and lovely, mean-hearted or kind, that had ever been.
And another notion was gladdening Vida’s mind. She knew what that spear could be used for. She had the answer to Sal’s question; she couldn’t wait to tell him.
Twenty-Three
“Well, go on, guess what I saw,” Vida said as she sank down beside Sal.
While she was gone he had woven the vines together into something like a basket. Otherwise, he was as he had been when she left—his long legs folded beneath him, his injury hidden as he sat beside the steadily burning embers. He was very Sal about this, and did not do as she commanded. He just glanced up at her with an expression both all-knowing and bent with amusement.
“I know a good place to put that, by the way.”
“Oh?” He laid the trap down and leaned back on his arms.
“By the rock that is shaped like a big grayish, pinkish egg; the fish are always in frenzy there in the morning for some reason. Not the really big fish. Just, you know, those silver ones about the length of your arm.”
“Then we will put it there,” he replied easily.
“You’re not going to guess?”
“The Queen of England.”
“No.”
“A troop of traveling circus acrobats.”
“No.”
Beautiful Wild Page 16
