The Exile of Sara Stevenson

by Darci Hannah

  There was something convincing in his look. Perhaps it was the way his eyes softened as he beheld me, or the sadness that was clearly in them. Whatever it was, I believed him.

  “Could …” I began, grasping for some explanation, “could you have possibly written them while you were in one of your … darker moods?” I suggested softly. “And not have even realized that you did it?”

  “What?” Obviously this suggestion offended him. “Are you suggesting … that I don’t know exactly what I’m about?” There was a chiding incredulity about him that almost shamed me from uttering what I just had. Yet before I could explain myself better he continued. “Could you, in fact, really be daft enough to think that I wrote those letters assuming another persona? I may have my darker moods, Miss Stevenson,” he whispered with a wry grin as he advanced on me, coming so close he was mere inches away. “Aye, very dark and dangerous moods indeed. But unfortunately I’m always frighteningly aware of exactly what I am about. Oh, what I would give for a half hour where I did not know what I’m about.”

  I put up my hands to block him from stepping any closer, but my belly, protruding even beyond my amazement, did that for me. He stopped at the feel of it pressing against his own hard stomach. Yet he did not back away, he stood firm and then looked down, marveling at me and the bulging entity I carried. “You really did not write those letters, did you?” I conceded, feeling the familiar upheaval of defeat. He shook his head slowly. “But the story … Mr. Seawell’s plight is familiar to you?” And to this he was forced to respond with a nod. “Then will you tell me, William, will you please tell me your story? You already know mine,” I uttered, staring into his liquid-crystal gaze, “but I, Mr. Campbell, am no wiser about you than I was when I first came here. Please,” I uttered desperately, “please at least give me this one thing. Tell me what horror has driven you to be out here, living on the very edge of the world, shunning all humanity that crosses your path.”

  For a moment I wasn’t certain he would comply, but something in him changed then, and that wall of dark isolation slowly dissolved. He reached down and took my hand in his; there was nothing shy or tentative about it. He was warm, solid yet gentle, and I liked the feel of the way he held on to me, as if he too needed to be held. And then, without further hesitation, he led me over to his bed. I watched as he fluffed the pillows and attempted to smooth the covers that likely had never been smoothed before, and then, sitting on the edge of the bed, he gently guided me next to him.

  The story of William Campbell was a hauntingly familiar one, but for the names and places.

  He had indeed been married when he was a younger man, fresh from medical school. He had been somewhat of a prodigy at Edinburgh University, passing exams with flying colors, and had looked forward to a promising career as a physician. He married his longtime sweetheart and started work as an attending physician in the Royal Infirmary. Yet for all the hard-won knowledge he attained in medical school, he soon found that in reality his skills were not nearly as effective as they had been on paper. There was more to the sick and poor than a standard procedure. And even when he had fought and struggled to save a life, he became only too aware that the poor had little resources to improve their health. They might survive the day, but the conditions they lived in, the only food they could afford, were all sadly inadequate. And he struggled with the failure he was met with nearly every day. His only solace back then had been his wife. And he had loved her dearly.

  But the real pain of life started the night his beloved went into labor with their first child. It should have never happened, for she wasn’t due for over a month. And he wasn’t even thinking she would have need of him when he answered a call for assistance. It was a call from a midwife delivering the bairn of a poor woman in the country on a frozen night in January. The woman had been ill, the messenger boy said, and was still battling this illness when she went into labor. The poor thing was expected to battle both.

  The cottage he was brought to where this laboring woman lived was cold when he arrived, not only from poor design, but from lack of means to even buy fuel for the fire. The woman in labor, after he examined her, was found with a high fever which compounded the trauma of childbirth. William questioned the husband and asked him why there was not a fire set to warm the house. But the man had seemed indifferent to both his wife and her discomfort. After doing his best to reduce her fever, and dosing her as he saw fit, William needed the use of hot water. That’s when he gave the husband some money and sent him to buy fuel.

  The husband never returned.

  It wasn’t until the next day, long after William had returned home, that the man was found in a tavern, drunk and oblivious to the world and the fact that his wife had died shortly after giving birth. The child, already sickly, lived only but a few hours. After this long, sleepless night, and likely contracting chills himself in payment for his fruitless struggle, he returned home, tired, disillusioned and wanting only the comfort of his wife’s arms. But he found that while he had been battling for the poor woman’s child, his own wife had gone into labor.

  It was far too early for the child. And when he had found her wracked with pain and sitting in a pool of blood on the floor he knew he would need to recall everything he had ever been taught to bring his child safely into the world. But he was not trained to be a midwife, or accoucheur, and by the time one could be gotten it would be too late. After a heart-wrenching struggle, he realized that the child was stuck and because it was not coming out, it was killing his wife. He was forced to make a decision to save one of them, and his logical choice was to save his wife. Desperation and inexperience drove him to try to take the child by cesarean, a risky surgical maneuver that had been performed successfully on many accounts. But that was with assistants, with instruments, and the help of strong opiates; he had nothing at hand. William was alone. And it was his only choice.

  In truth, he knew little about what he was attempting, but his wife’s fervent pleas drove him to do it, she pleaded for him to take the child, and with little choice he pulled out his knife and cut into her.

  It was a horrible, bloody mess. As soon as he reached the womb he knew what a mistake he had made, for his wife was bleeding profusely. He worked quickly, furiously; but the blood, the screams, the blue fetus stuck in his wife’s pelvis, overwhelmed him, and he knew that all the while he was working in this furious manner, his wife was slipping further away. He grabbed the tiny fetus—his son—and dislodged it from its mother. The bairn was still alive, but just barely. And he abandoned him, hastily wrapped, to the floor and began cauterizing the vessels he had severed. By the time he had finished, the great incision sewn closed, his wife was already unconscious. He did everything he knew to save her, but he still could not stop the bleeding. And in this helpless despair, alone with his wife in his arms—a woman he had butchered with his own knife—she had died. The baby, small and weak, and unable to take a full breath of air, had also died.

  And that destroyed him.

  In that one terrible night he had lost the very impetus that drove him. He lost his will to be a doctor; he lost his will to live. Short of killing himself, which he would not fathom to do, being one who had learned the value of life and had taken the Hippocratic oath, he made the decision to escape all his memories of Edinburgh and took a job as a naval surgeon.

  As Mr. MacKay had alluded to earlier, the voyage was met with an overwhelming medical disaster. Just two weeks out of the harbor, yellow fever had been brought aboard by a pressed convict and spread unchecked throughout the crowded lower decks. In a matter of weeks the crew was reduced to barely even enough men to work the sails, let alone fight her. And that was only the beginning of his private hell afloat … that was when total isolation called to William Campbell.

  When his spectacularly disastrous commission in the navy finally ended, and he miraculously found that he was still alive, he went to my father’s office. He knew his father had gone to school with my father; the two
had been old friends. It was out of duty to this friendship that William Campbell was given the appointment on Bell Rock—that forlorn sunken reef in the Firth of Forth. It was on the Bell where his penance had begun, and in the long, lonely nights of his duty, the ghosts had started to appear. Every one of them, every man, woman and child he had ever laid a hand on under the guise of healing, called to him from beyond the grave. And slowly, very slowly, they pulled him into an unworldly existence; and he, for his part, accepted his lot.

  “That was why I did not want to see you here, Sara,” he whispered when he could, looking beseechingly into my eyes. “That was why I resented you showing up the way you did: so young, so full of life, so careless with your charms. And, God save me, but I didn’t want your death, or the death of your child, on my hands. I wanted to hate you. And when I found that I couldn’t do it, I tried to make you hate me,” he uttered, his luminescent eyes becoming moist with emotion. “Oh Sara,” he gasped. “You have no idea the torment I suffered for it.”

  I could see it. It was still there, clear in his magnificent eyes, and it broke my heart. I reached up to him, putting my hands on either side of his trembling face, and pulled his head to my body, holding him tightly against my chest as he wept, my rotund belly acting as a pillow to absolve his long overdue tears. I crushed him to me with a force driven as much by heartache and sorrow as it was by mutual need.

  “It’s all right now, William,” I whispered into his thick chestnut hair as my own tears dripped off my cheeks into the soft nest of curls. “And never, never you worry about me. I give you my word; I swear I will not be another ghost to haunt you. You may think me foolhardy and selfish, and perhaps I am, but I will tell you this, no man yet has ever driven my will from me. And I have a very strong will, William, to live.”

  “Aye,” he uttered, still in the throes of his sorrow. At length he sat up, and while I dried his tears with the back of my hand he studied me. And then he whispered, “’Tis just, at times, ye remind me so much of her.”

  “Am I like your wife?” I asked with a soft smile, my hand still caressing his stubble-covered cheek.

  To my surprise he shook his head. “Nay, in truth ye are nothing like her.”

  This was not the answer I had been expecting, for the dear creature he had described to me had sounded like a beautiful and charming woman, and secretly I wanted very much to elicit admiration from this man. He must have seen my disappointment because he felt compelled to continue, “My wife obeyed me without question. You, on the other hand, have a habit of not minding me at all.”

  “Well then,” I replied softly, fighting hard not to smile at this taunt against my character. “I shall just have to try harder. But I’m not promising any miraculous change.”

  I received a smile for this, a heartbreaking, genuine smile, and the mood in the room became somewhat electric. I was still sitting close to the man, on his bed—holding his hand—and I realized then that I was drawn to him just as, perhaps, he was drawn to me. We sat in silence, reveling in the comfort that had settled between us, thousands of questions and curious thoughts still swirling in my mind, waiting to be given voice, and while I was thinking of what to say to him a rather untimely, unpleasant thought occurred to me. Quite suddenly, and rashly, I blurted out, “Oh dear God!” and yanked my hand from his grasp.

  This startled the poor man greatly, and he narrowed his eyes at me, thinking, perhaps, I had gone daft again. I explained, “The letter … the last letter I wrote to Mr. Seawell …”

  “What about it?”

  “Well, I was certain it was you who was writing me. Remember? And he promised me, just as you had, that he would protect my child. And then I asked the man … no, William, I implored the man to come for me before I was to give birth!”

  At first he didn’t see the importance of this and looked deeply into my eyes, questioning my sanity. I placed my hand over his and squeezed fervently. “Don’t you see? He’s coming for me. Alexander Seawell of Oxford is coming to Cape Wrath, William, because I asked him to!”

  “Well, how do you ken that? Why would the man come all the way out here to champion a strange woman who could, for all intents and purposes, be a loon?” he queried, while smiling slightly at the way he had enunciated the word “loon.”

  But I was not smiling. “Because,” I averred nervously, “I received his reply. It was a very short missive, William. Hasty even, as if the man were in love … and I was certain it was from you!”

  “You said the man sounded as if he were in love with ye? By God, lass, what did the note say?” His curiosity was obviously piqued, although I could see he didn’t like the sound of this at all.

  “It said, quite simply: ‘My dear Mrs. Crichton, I am on my way!’”

  ELEVEN

  The Storm

  It had grown dark and was well into the night when William brought me back to my room. We had spent a long time in his room talking, and he seemed intent on putting me to bed in mine, showing all the tenderness of a lover as he did so, seeing me into my night shift and tucking the quilts high under my chin. He then sat on the edge of the mattress and beheld me under the soft glow of the oil lamp. “I promise, we shall sort this all out,” he assured, “and very soon, at that.” And then he bent to place a chaste kiss on my forehead, whispering as he did so that I should get some sleep. “There’s a right storm brewing out there, lass, and it’s likely to be a dirty night. Sleep now and I shall see ye in the morning.”

  He was about to sit up when my arms came around him. It was on impulse; I couldn’t help it, and suddenly I felt myself pulling him back down to me, bringing his fine lips to my mouth. It was a temptation the light-keeper could not resist.

  He came to me willingly, warmly, and it quite took the breath from me. It had been a long time since any man had done so. If Thomas Crichton had left me and was never coming back, then at least William Campbell was here—and he was tender, and urgent, and sensual. He was a man as destitute and lost as I, yet he had vowed to stand by me and had gone through great personal pain to do so. Thomas had also made a vow, but a vow forsworn; he had failed me.

  My heart was still of two minds on the matter, but my body was pathetically, and quite willingly, responsive to William Campbell. He was like the dark of night to Thomas’ bright shining day: saturnine light-keeper against sanguine mariner. Two more different men from totally different worlds there could not be, and, God help me, but my heart was overwhelmed with the want of both of them.

  I was awkward and pregnant. It had likely been a long while since the light-keeper had felt the arms of a woman around him. And he tumbled into the bed beside me, pulling me to him with a hunger that left me breathless. His kisses were cathartic; his lips, full and supple—and the sound they elicited from my constricted throat surprised even him. It drove his need; dear God, he was as ravenous as I. And though he was tender he was unwilling to wait any longer. Forgoing all the finesse of a surgeon, he yanked the tie of my night shift and threw it wide open, pausing to stare at what lay before him. There was an animal-like hunger in his eyes tempered by a look of breathless awe. His gaze was as potent and erotic as his kisses. “Dear Lord,” he uttered at last, breathing as heavily as I. “But ye are a creature of rare beauty, Sara Stevenson.” And then slowly, very slowly, he began his exquisite assault. His mouth moved from my lips to caress the tender skin beneath my chin. My head went back in ecstasy as he slowly explored the taut line of my throat with his sublimely sensitive mouth. And the delicious torture he practiced on me continued working its way down, all the way down, to the soft swollen mounds of my breasts. They were larger than they had ever been before, and very sensitive. And the suddenness of his warm mouth over my erect nipple caused a wave of throbbing pleasure that nearly rendered me senseless. I cried out, unable to help myself.

  My pleasure inspired him—ignited him—and with a skill I could never have imagined, he drove every thought from me with his hunger, his insatiable tongue and his cleverly e
xploring lips. I could not stand it. My body, huge and cumbersome though it was, cried out for him with an untrammeled desire I never dreamed possible. And to make him fully understand what it was that I wanted, what it was that I ached for, I removed a hand from the tangled chestnut curls of his head, and reached down to the swollen hardness straining to break free between his muscled thighs. I tried to find the buttons on his breeches to release him, but gave up—with a mind too distracted by his expert assault—and instead slipped my hand under the waistband of his pants. It was my turn to feel the thrill of his sudden, surprised, pleasure-laden gasp.

  He was magnificently built, smooth, hard and urgently ready. And with my hand thus making him readier still, reveling in the feel of him, the pleasure he took from my touch and the eagerness of his need, I begged him to love me, having no doubt that he would.

  “Please, William,” I uttered to his splendid dark head, my breath dispersing through his thick silky hair. “Dear God!” I half cried, half pleaded. “I know it’s a bit awkward but I’m afraid I’ll die if we don’t.”

  He looked up from between my breasts with eyes afire, matching the heat in my own. One arm was gently draped over the swell of my belly, the other still taunting a sensitive nipple. “You’ll die? Dear God, lass, have a care for me,” he breathed, and I watched with dark pleasure as his eyes rolled back in ecstasy as my hand continued to stroke his sensitive, very ready maleness. And then, stilling my hand with the one so recently employed on my wanton breast, he said, “My dear, you’ve already made me your slave. But are you sure …? I dinna want to hurt ye.” And I could see in his mesmerizing gaze that he was utterly sincere.

  His stoic self-control touched me. But I didn’t want self-control; I wanted to feel the wild, unheeded passion I saw in his eyes. “William Campbell,” I uttered in a breathless moan, my body aching with a torturous unfulfillment from the want of him. “If you never listen to me on anything else, please, please, listen to me on this. Love me, William Campbell, for the love of God, make love to me now!”