Claire

by A. S. Harrington

  Then, with a last glance at the back of the watch, she took a deep breath and closed her hands over the rough hemp of the small rope ladder and pushed one foot behind her, into space, until she found the first narrow rung. Planting her other foot beside the first, she put her weight onto the rope and hung tightly to it as it swung crazily out into darkness thirty feet above the ocean. Furious that she had allowed herself to be talked into this madness, Claire closed her eyes for a brief instant, and then scurried down the rope, faster after she had mastered its motion against the ship. When she reached the water, Rajat was waiting for her.

  “Here, follow the rope,” he said, putting a soggy piece of braided petticoat into her hands, “quickly.” He remained by the ladder; she could barely see the four heads of the other women bobbing beside the ship where Rajat had tied a piece of cord to the prow.

  The water was colder than she had expected. Even without her chemise, Claire’s dress, heavy around her legs, made her move slowly, almost as if it had paralyzed her. Then Claudia whispered, “Claire! Come on!” across the water, and somehow she began to move faster. It was then she realized that Consuela was hauling her in, hand over hand; Rajat had released the rope behind her. She reached them only a second before that heavy gown pulled her below the surface. A hand took her firmly and pulled her head above water, and she was there.

  They had made it.

  Rajat was gone behind her, with only a quiet ripple in the water glittering in the moonlight to show his path toward the other ship. And Claire was cold; freezing cold.

  “We’ve done it!” Claudia said through chattering teeth, with a cheerful whisper. “Not that I ever doubted we would!”

  “Claudia, I’m freezing!” retorted her sister.

  “Yes, it is cold, and I for one don’t care, so long as I am out of that cabin,” replied her sister calmly. Rajat had made a large ring for them to hold to, separate from the guide-rope, which now floated aimlessly on the surface. “I suppose we’d better haul that in, in case someone notices it,” she added, and she and Elena, with their free hands, began to pull it toward them.

  Within a quarter of an hour Claire’s arm was aching horribly as she strained to hold herself above water, and it seemed to do no good to change to the other, for that one too hurt painfully, after just a few moments. Every now and again the movement of the ocean would push them toward the hull of the ship; it was soft and slick in the darkness, with a smell and a texture that revolted her. And Claire was beyond being cold; she was chilled to numbness. It had been a half hour, and she was beginning to think this the very worst idea ever.

  “Claudia,” she whispered. Consuela was humming in the darkness, a low murmur of sound barely audible over the lap of the waves against the hull.

  “What is it?”

  “I’m— I’m so very cold,” Claire stammered, teeth chattering. “And my arm is hurting awfully— ”

  “Don’t think about it,” answered her older sister instantly.

  “I can’t not think about it,” Claire retorted grumpily.

  “Think about something pleasant,” said Claudia quietly. “Think about how very proud Varian shall be that you’ve made it through all this.”

  And Claire was so astonished that she forgot about her arm. She stared in the darkness at her sister’s face, so like her own, and concluded, there in the moonlight that she, Claire, the one who was always ready for anything, the sister, bravest of all, who had stood down the Moroccans at Faro, was no more courageous than quiet, shy Claudia, whom she had always thought of as hiding in the library.

  “You love him very much, don’t you?” Claire whispered in sudden cognition of the change that had been wrought in her older sister. While Claire had been barricaded for the past few months in that impregnable fortress of mistrust and self-pity she had erected around herself, Claudia had changed.

  “You’ve asked me that before, as if you don’t believe it,” said Claudia in a low voice in her sister’s ear. “Have you thought I didn’t have much of a heart just because I don’t enact a tragedy, like Chloe?”

  “Or— or fly into dithers over inconsequential letters?” said Claire, with sudden regret.

  “Oh, Claire, dearest, you are you, I am me,” Claudia said. “Don’t imagine I am just a pale shadow of you and Chloe. I am not.”

  “What,” asked her youngest sister quietly, “have you been thinking of? To forget all this?”

  Claudia’s serene smile shone in the darkness. “Shakespeare,” she said.

  “Not Tony?”

  “The two are quite indivisible, Claire,” her sister replied.

  “Can’t you say something out loud for poor Claire, who never studied?”

  “You would like his sonnets; I shall tell Varian to read them to you,” she said, smiling at her sister in the darkness. “Listen to this one, then,” and said softly,

  When most I wink, then do mine eyes best see,

  For all the day they view things unrespected;

  But when I sleep, in dreams they look on thee,

  And darkly bright are bright in dark directed.

  Then thou, whose shadow shadows doth make bright,

  How would thy shadow’s form form happy show

  To the clear day with thy much clearer light,

  When to unseeing eyes thy shade shines so!

  How would, I say, mine eyes be blessed made

  By looking on thee in the living day,

  When in dead night thy fair imperfect shade

  Through heavy sleep on sightless eyes doth stay!

  All days are nights to see till I see thee,

  And nights bright days when dreams do show thee me.

  “I don’t say it as well as Tony does,” Claudia finished, a little shyly.

  “You do it very beautifully,” replied Claire, in a hushed voice, wishing suddenly that she had known her sister better, and feeling a little old, and no longer noticing the rest of it. “Will you say it again?”

  Somehow, they waited.

  They never discovered that Rajat had to kill for them. He never told them, although he later recounted it to Varian Drew, the tale of that silent, intense battle below the waves, of that airless, drowning struggle which he had fought over a worthless, priceless rowboat.

  The captain had left it tied up astern with a sailor in it, and Rajat could never have taken it from him without killing him. For Rajat, killing was a mortal sin; he took his master Drew’s very welcome orders seriously enough to commit an act which he could not otherwise have justified.

  Rajat surprised the sailor, just as Drew had surprised Balaghat. He dragged him over the edge and into the sea, and went straight down under the ocean with the struggling sailor’s neck in a death grip, just as Drew had dragged the huge cat to the ground and rolled over and over with him in a wrestler’s embrace, so the cat could no longer launch himself at his enemy. That night there was no space between the India-man and the sailor, just as there had been no space between Drew and Balaghat.

  In the end, both battles were tests of skill rather than strength, Rajat’s struggle in the ocean, and Drew’s fight in the dust of the rain forest before the rains. Rajat held his knife in his teeth; Drew had lost his knife, and had, by some miracle, found it again, though Rajat knew that here, in the ocean, he would not have benefit of a like miracle. So he paced himself; he used surprise against the sailor’s superior strength, and the black of a night ocean against the sailor’s skill, and his own determination against the sailor’s will to live. In the end, just as the Englishman with the limp had killed Balaghat, it was the India-man, the Pariah, untouchable, the impure offspring of many lands, who killed the powerful French sailor.

  Rajat pulled himself away as the heavy body ceased struggling and began to drag at him. His lungs bursting for air, he thrust himself toward the surface, and somehow managed to find his way, his eyes blinded red for a moment, back to the rowboat, the means to freedom for which he had killed. Without thought of discovery,
for in that instant that he surfaced all he knew was his burning lungs, he heaved himself into the small boat and lay there, exhausted, half-drowned, and finally, slowly, returned his knife to its sheath beneath his loose trousers, and found the oars and locked them as quietly as possible, and cast off the rope. With a final consideration of the course he had already decided upon, he silently, slowly, cautiously dipped the oars into the night ocean.

  One treads on the tail of a tiger, which does not bite him; there will be progress and success. He becomes full of apprehensive caution, and in the end there will be good fortune.

  Out across that moonlit expanse of water, Rajat ventured carefully between two evils. Look at the whole course that is trodden, and examine the presage which that gives. If it be complete and without failure, there will be great good fortune.

  With long, deep strokes, barely breaking the surface of the water, he rowed away from land, astern of the ships, out of the watch light toward the shadow of the vessels, protected from the moonlight. And then slowly, cautiously, without breaking a stroke in the calm night, he took the long way around the ship where they had been held captive, all the way around, back toward land, toward those four sodden figures hanging silently, numbly, to the rope on the prow.

  “There will be progress and success,” he said quietly to Lady Claudia, who turned her head in the water as he glided, silently, out of nowhere, on the other side of the prow.

  “Rajat! You’ve— ”

  “Thank God!” came Claire’s low voice. It had been an eternity; past. She saw him ship the oars and extend a hand to keep the small boat from knocking against the ship’s hull. With a deep sigh of determination, she said, “I’ll go first,” and without his help, managed to climb aboard the small craft with the same skill with which she had once thrown a leg over a low branch of the oak tree in the garden at Banning House.

  It would seem that perhaps she still had something worthwhile to accomplish for this small, scraggly party of theirs; she took Elena’s hand and helped the child into the boat while Rajat held it steady against the ship, and then Claudia came aboard, shivering suddenly, and finally they managed to heave Consuela inside.

  Then came a new insult: if they had thought it cold in the water, it was nothing, nothing to the chill of the night air against their frozen skin and wet clothes.

  “Here,” said Claire, her teeth chattering as Rajat threw the oars once again and pushed away gently from the ship. “Let me help.”

  “I will row,” he said quietly, and took up both oars and sank them deeply into the black ocean with silent, strong strokes, as the four women huddled more closely together against the night air.

  And thus, treading on the tail of the tiger, they escaped.

  It was almost dawn when they made shore. The village lay motionless in shadows, silhouetted against the brilliant edge of the sun over the horizon, the white sand of the beach tinged peach and gold, with the apricot orchards over the hills in the distance rising up cool and dark against daybreak.

  The village was nothing more than a few boats in a cove, with a long row of rosy houses and tiled roofs peeking out over the walls of a narrow, winding street that led upward into the hills behind from the flat, rocky seashore.

  It was Vimeiro, although the five weary travelers did not know it yet. In the apricot trees just past the village were two armies, one French, one English, their heavy guns dug down into the loose earth, with camps here and there in the hills, and men spread out across five miles, toward the small farms and orchards that dotted the interior.

  They pulled the boat up onto the beach alongside reddish-brown nets laid out in an even pattern to dry; there were a few hardy souls already about, a cart here and there on the narrow streets above, the clatter of pottery against stone, the rustle of an occasional palm, the hint of Moorish history, the bleat of a goat, all awakening in the small village on this warm August morning. A sea breeze dusted up the sand past where the tide had darkened it as, too exhausted to speak, they made their way single-file up past the rocks and the stone sea-wall, past the ancient steps set down centuries ago for just such travelers to come in from the sea.

  There was no inn; there was a church near the center of town, perched over the ocean in cool and silent antiquity. They went inside and knelt, all of them, Portuguese, English, Indian, Catholic, Anglican, Hindu, and gave thanks for their delivery. When a priest came toward them from before the altar, Claire began an exhausted explanation.

  By then there were only four; Rajat had slipped out, back into the dawn, and had made his way up the winding street and past the edges of the town, past the tile-roofed houses and the ancient-laid street, to where the cobbles gave way to dirt, and then the street narrowed to a path and disappeared into the apricot trees.

  With a long stride and a clear purpose, Rajat covered the ground toward the armies without hesitation. Because last night, after he drifted like a shadow over the ship in that quarter hour that he had searched for the rowboat, Rajat had heard of the fighting. He had heard the sailors talking, bragging, predicting.

  Rajat knew the English were near, and he meant to find them.

  It took him almost an hour, and the better part of it was spent waiting and listening. These were skills he had learned early, the arts of patience; it was the finest talent of the wise. He listened and heard French, and turned his silent, shadowy progress in the first light another direction, southwards, until he heard English, and laughter.

  Finding a guard was easy. In fact, the guard found Rajat, who was sitting on a stone in the shade— the morning was already warm— eating an apricot.

  “Good morning,” Rajat said, in perfect English.

  Fear, astonishment, mistrust; Rajat read all those in the two plain faces past the bayonets pointed at his heart.

  “I am Rajat, servant of Lord Banning from England,” he said politely, and waited for a response which did not come. “He limps; he speaks Portuguese. You know him?”

  One soldier, good Yorkshire stock, glanced at his companion. “Nae,” he said, shaking his head suspiciously.

  “I have brought news for him; can you find him for me? I am unarmed; I mean you no harm,” he said, extending his hands palm upwards.

  “Where d’you come from?”

  “I come from the village,” said Rajat simply, because what is easy, is easy to know; what is simple, is simple to follow. Thus are all the principles in the world successfully obtained.

  “Come along then,” said one soldier, staring at Rajat’s dark face, after one more second of hesitation as he motioned with his bayonet.

  They took him through a vast camp beneath the trees to a large tent at the edge of two hillsides, where one soldier waited outside with him while the other conferred briefly with a soldier standing guard by the tent. The guard disappeared into the tent, and a second later the tent flap was thrown back, and Varian Drew, blue-eyed, intense, silent, questioning, his golden head glinting in the early morning sun through the trees, appeared. For a second he stared at his servant and then he said in Urdu, “Rajat! You are here?” Ap yahân hayn?

  Rajat bowed. “I have many things to tell you,” he said. “There are three French merchant ships lying a league offshore to unload guns for the enemy; six French warships accompany them. They can be taken easily,” he said, “if one desires to do so.”

  The blue eyes did not waver from Rajat’s dark face. For a second longer Varian Drew stood there; he was dressed in his India clothes, the soft boots and rough brown trousers of the bush, the well-worn shirt open at the neck, his sleeves rolled accustomedly past his elbows. Then he nodded and turned aside, back into the tent, and said something in English to the men inside, and came out with Tony Merrill just behind him, the other peer’s coat gone, his white shirt creased.

  “Morning, Rajat,” said Merrill pleasantly. “I assume you’re not alone?”

  “No; I have left them in the village at the church,” he said, nodding at the calm gentleman, and proceed
ed to explain, as they went quickly down toward the village through the apricot trees.

  At a little past eight that morning, the guns began again. Claire had just fallen asleep on a pallet in the small house of the kind widow who had taken in the strangers at the behest of the village priest; she opened her eyes briefly at the boom of distant thunder, but then merely turned over and went immediately back to sleep.

  For eight hours longer all of them slept the dreamless sleep of exhaustion, and when Claire woke again, it was four o’clock in the afternoon. She heard the distant thunder still roaring, only this time when she saw the bright sunshine outside she frowned in speculation, and got up and went to the window.

  There were men in the street. There were wounded lying side by side, some of them groaning against the walls of the rosy houses, with black-garbed women tending them as best they could. She stared outside for a moment longer, and then went quickly out through the open garden, past the widow’s flowers and her fig tree, into the street to gaze around. The thunder was not thunder at all; it was the solid reverberations of heavy guns, and the soldiers here in the streets of the village were English.

  Claire found someone to talk to her; she shook his shoulder and offered him a drink, which he accepted it gratefully as he held to a bloody bandage wrapped around his forearm. She told him who she was, and asked him where he had been fighting, and he told her all of it.

  The English army had left Lisbon three days ago, marching northwards along the coast to meet Junot’s Army of Portugal. The decision had been to protect the port at Lisbon from French attack, and to do so the English had to surprise the French— who expected them to stay ranged around the port city— with an attack in the open. Yesterday the fighting had been light, and they had been further from the coast, but as the French had retreated toward the sea, the English had followed them, to drive them, so the English thought, into the ocean.

  Claire stared at the wounded man for a second; with a gasp, she thought of the three ships lying at anchor. On an incoherent apology, she left him to run down the winding street toward the church, whose wide porches on the west overhung the hill below toward the sea. She came flying around a cool stucco column, her slippers clicking on the mosaic tiles beneath her feet, and halted, her hand resting on the column as she stopped.