She stripped off her woollen coat and tossed it into the cabin of the sloop to let the warmth of the sun soak into the navy wool of her jumper. Warmth was a relative term, as the temperatures were not what most Londoners would consider comfortable. Still, after months of days that never quite got cold enough to snow, but always brought a fog or a drizzle, any dry sunshine constituted weather worthy of removing an outer layer of clothing. With a little exertion, she might even be down to a long-sleeve T-shirt before she shoved off.
She set to work threading the sails that had been stowed all winter. Away from the damp and occasional icy morning, they’d fared well. As she ran the canvas through her fingertips, checking for tears or even brittle patches, she found none on either the mainsail or the foresail. Then, using a few fresh lengths of rope, she secured everything to the mast in rolls ready to unfurl when needed.
It had been low tide when she’d started the process, but the waves had rolled in, filling the estuary noticeably now. Her family’s twin keel Macwester 27 was perfect for such a drastic tidal environment. The boat stood upright securely, even on dry land, but she could no longer make out the sandy bottom below when she leaned over the side. She would need the rowboat to get back and forth between the shore before long, and she needed at least one more run inland before she could sail. She made a mental list of things she needed to pick up. A quick peek inside the cabin confirmed Charlie hadn’t packed the life preservers or the two-way radio when they’d launched yesterday. It had seemed to take everything in him not to drown when they’d hauled the boat from the yard into the estuary. He’d never taken to the water the way Brogan had, so it was her name Charlie had cursed when he slipped into the frigid river to the echoes of their father’s thick laughter.
She smiled at the memory and hopped over the edge with a splash that didn’t cover her thigh-high rubber boots, yet. The wellies did little to hide the cold, though, as she sloshed toward the boathouse with only slightly less speed than Charlie had the day before. Still laughing at the visual of her brother scrambling backward like a crab with his butt dragging the sand, she looked up in time to see a solitary figure come around a bend in the riverbank.
Even squinting against the sun, she instantly recognized the shape and set of Emma Volant’s body. She was willowy and slender like the tall marsh grasses bending and bowing gracefully in the ocean breeze. The golden light of a Northland sun shimmered in waves across her fair hair, more luminous now than it’d ever appeared indoors. Brogan remembered defending her looks to a family full of good-intentioned gossipers. At the time their assessments had seemed unfair. Now they felt almost absurd. Emma was beautiful as she strolled along the dirt path that skirted the seawall protecting the estuary.
Their eyes met as Emma glanced up from her feet and caught Brogan staring, standing knee deep in freezing water. Emma lifted her hand in a little wave.
“Hello,” Brogan called, then instantly wished she’d thought of a better opening, but all she could think to add was the equally banal, “Beautiful day.”
“Indeed,” Emma said, walking closer. “I should be writing, but I couldn’t stay inside with so much sun out here.”
“Can’t blame you. And plenty of other tourists will feel the same, come the weekend. You might as well make the most of the solitude while you’ve got it.”
“Will the place turn into a raucous party beach before my eyes?”
She laughed. “Not hardly. Mostly families and retirees come for a day or two. Compared to other towns up and down the coast, we’ve got it easy.” Maybe too easy, she mused, thinking about how low the preseason bookings at the Raven had been so far. “But you’ll notice a difference. More traffic on the beach, fewer parking spaces to be found in the village.”
“I don’t suppose that will affect me much,” Emma said amicably. “I’m not much of a sunbather, and I don’t drive over here.”
“Me either,” Brogan said quickly. “I mean, I drive, but I’ve got my own parking space, and I don’t do any sunbathing either.”
“I imagine redheads burn about as badly as blondes do?” Emma asked, with a smile.
“Worse.”
Emma gave a playful grimace, then glanced down at the water now rushing around Brogan’s legs. “I hope you handle the cold better for it, though, because you’re about to have some icy toes.”
“Oh, yeah,” Brogan said sheepishly, and bracing her hands on the stone wall in front of her, hauled her weight out of the water. “I came in here for something, but at the moment I can’t remember what.”
“In?”
She nodded over her shoulder. “From the boat.”
Emma’s eyes went wide as she surveyed the sloop, its blue hull now touching the water and its single mast glinting in the sun. “Yours?”
“Technically my father’s, but he says he’s getting too old for sailing, so I run most of the specialty tours, and he does the main puffin cruises on his motorboat.” She pointed to a large gray and blue restored lifeboat with a small captain’s cabin and a wide, flat deck that was anchored to a dock on the other side of the river.
“Puffin cruises,” Emma repeated, as if she liked the sound of the words.
“There are plenty of companies who do them from various points along the North Sea, but I think the McKay clan’s as good as any. Our boats aren’t nearly as big as some of the others, but that allows us to get closer to the islands without disturbing the nests. Plus, we’ve all been exploring these waters since we were kids. No summer hire can learn in a season what I’ve spent decades navigating.”
“I believe you,” Emma said earnestly. “I bet you run a tip-top ship, Captain.”
“Which reminds me, I came in to get some life jackets and a radio. Safety first.”
She ducked into a nearby wooden hut and counted out eight bright-orange vests and tossed them out onto the grass before calling, “What about you? What have you been up to lately?”
“Not a whole lot, honestly. I’m afraid I lead a boring life.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“It’s true,” Emma said sadly. “I think I’ll be quite a disappointment to all the wonderful people who’ve been so nice to me. I fear they’d prefer their new neighbor to be more exciting or engaging, but I’m very much a bore.”
“I hate to break it to you,” Brogan said, as she exited the shed with a two-way radio in hand and began to toss the life vests into a rowboat bobbing just over the wall, “but Reggie’s told everyone you were a total rock star at her school two weeks ago.”
Emma blushed. “She’s too generous. I barely muddled through. Those kids asked some tough questions. It started easily enough, but they got harder the older the kids got. By the time Reggie took the mic, I was half expecting her to grill me about Kafka or Proust.”
“I wouldn’t put it past her. She was so excited I think she probably did a fair bit of studying, but whatever bar she set for the event, you hurdled it. And thank you for that, by the way.”
“For hurdling?”
“For agreeing to go in the first place. I know you probably didn’t want to play guinea pig for a bunch of local school kids, but it meant a lot to her.”
“I was sort of dreading it,” Emma admitted, “but it wasn’t nearly as terrible as I feared. I think it actually may have done me some good to share in the kids’ excitement. It’s fun to remember how much books mean to people at that age. They aren’t commodities, they’re portals to adventures.”
Brogan liked the hint of color she saw rising in Emma’s cheeks and the steadiness in her voice. “And what about you, Ms. Volant? Do you like adventures?”
She paled slightly at the question, her lips pressed tightly together, and Brogan rushed to fill the void spreading between them. “Nothing major mind you, but I was about to take the boat out for my first run of the season. Not far, maybe around Coquet Island, and I wouldn’t mind some company or an extra set of hands.”
Emma glanced out toward the island Br
ogan nodded to, then back at her with a grimace. Her heart sank. Was it the boat or her company that spurred such a response?
“I don’t know.” Emma hemmed. “I mean, you’re taking the boat out into the ocean?”
Brogan looked around with a half-smile as if there was some other way to get to the island. “That’s the general idea. But it’ll be smooth sailing today, not much in the way of waves if you’re worried about getting seasick.”
“No, I don’t get seasick. Or, I guess I shouldn’t say that. I don’t know if I get seasick, because I’ve never been out on the sea, or even in a sailboat.”
Brogan laughed. “Then why the look of horror when I mentioned it? I hope it’s not my company that inspires such terror.”
“Oh no!” Emma said quickly, the hint of pink in her cheeks flushing crimson. “No, if I were to take a chance on the open water with anyone, it’d certainly be with someone like you. I don’t know why my first inclination is always to think of all the reasons I shouldn’t do something. I suppose to answer your earlier question, no, I don’t normally go for adventures.”
“I don’t believe you,” Brogan said again.
Emma’s eyes filled with tears, but she managed to say, “It’s true. Someone who knows me very well once told me, point blank, I have zero sense of adventure, and I think she was right.”
Brogan despised that person. She didn’t even know her, though she suspected she knew who she was, but apparently Brogan didn’t have to meet someone for their existence to inspire a white-hot hate. She bit her tongue from saying so, though, as she strongly suspected Emma wasn’t in an emotional state to hear it. Instead, she chose her words carefully. “That person must’ve known a different version of you, because the Emma I’ve met packed up her life and moved across an ocean to a place where she didn’t know anyone. I can’t imagine any greater adventure. Certainly no boat trip around an island full of birds could compare.”
Emma snorted. “When you put it that way . . .”
Brogan could still hear the hesitancy in Emma’s voice, but it was fading, or maybe being overtaken by something else, something lighter, something more hopeful, and the shift inspired something similar in Brogan, who nodded toward the blue rowboat floating mere meters away. “What do you say? Is a little bit of risk worth another adventure?”
Emma screwed up her shoulders, pursed her lips, and closed her eyes, then pushed out a rapid breath. “Yes, let’s go.”
£ £ £
Emma couldn’t believe she’d said yes. She was not a “yes” kind of person. And yet here she was, sitting in a tiny shell of a rowboat as Brogan pulled on the oars and sent them gliding along the place near where the river met the sea. The water wasn’t deep yet, maybe three feet, and she could still clearly see the top of slender grasses waving in the tide. A little minnow type of fish swam against the current underneath them, and she smiled at his efforts. What did she have to be worried about? She wasn’t in the water, and she wasn’t doing any work to keep them on course. Glancing up at Brogan, her smile only grew. Brogan was so steady and calm, Emma couldn’t help but believe in her competence. As she steered them toward the sailboat with fluid strokes of the oars, a gentle breeze stirred her copper hair, giving a rugged and windswept appeal to her soft, green eyes and pale complexion. It was a look many woman would kill for, or kill to get close to. As close as Emma was sitting on the small bench opposite her. She could’ve reached out and brushed a strand of hair from where it had fallen across Brogan’s forehead.
The thought warmed a part of her stomach she hadn’t been able to fill even with her newfound love of scones. She didn’t know what to make of that feeling, but she didn’t hate it, and before she had a chance to overthink it, Brogan bumped the dinghy softly against the side of the sailboat. She dropped an anchor and tucked the oars along the sides of the rowboat.
“All aboard,” she said, as she grabbed hold of a ladder extending off the back and pulled until the rowboat came flush with the sailboat.
Standing with only a slight wobble, Emma tightly gripped the handrails and quickly climbed the three rungs of the ladder. She was still steadying herself on the deck when Brogan practically vaulted up beside her, arms full of all the things she’d brought from shore. Emma blinked a few times, then stared down at the now empty rowboat. How had she done that?
“Can I help with anything?” she asked, more out of a sense of obligation than the sense she had anything to offer in this situation.
“You can stow these things in the cabin.” Brogan handed her the stack of orange lifejackets. “I’ll lift anchor and start the motor.”
Emma took the two steps needed to duck into the cabin and saw two small tables and a single bunk piled high with rolled maps and coils of rope. Behind her, a gas engine rumbled to life.
“I thought this was a sailboat,” she called, as she stacked the vests atop one of the tables.
“It is,” Brogan said when Emma stepped back out into the sun, “but we keep a small outboard motor for turning around in the narrow confines of the estuary and in case of emergencies on the water. As soon as we clear the currents at the mouth of the river, we’ll hoist sail.”
We’ll hoist sail. Not a phrase Emma ever thought she’d be included in. As Brogan brought the boat around to face the North Sea, Emma’s heart beat faster. The North Sea. Wasn’t this where Vikings sailed? She was no Viking. She was a suburban New Yorker who’d just gotten on a boat with a woman she barely knew. That wasn’t adventurous so much as irresponsible and dangerous. Sure, Brogan seemed to know what she was doing, but honestly, Brogan could have told her this ship was made of dragon hide and ran on marshmallows, and Emma wouldn’t have been able to authoritatively tell her otherwise. Honestly, she was equally versed in dragons and sailboats, which was to say she’d seen them both in pictures or movies.
“See the cross atop that hill to the right?” Brogan asked conversationally, as if her heart wasn’t pounding in her rib cage, probably because it wasn’t. “The first church in town was built up there by the monks based at the monastery in Lindisfarne. Then about a few hundred years later, a big storm came through and rerouted the river to run between the town and church. That’s when they built the church the village still uses today.”
“When was that?”
Brogan shrugged. “A couple hundred years ago.”
“Is that all?” Emma asked, easing down on the bench seat opposite her. “It’s a shame you all don’t have much history to hold onto over here.”
Brogan laughed and turned the boat until they angled out of the mouth of the river.
A few of the minor waves pushing toward the shore caused the bow of the boat to rise and fall several inches, and Emma clutched at the edge of her seat as if she might be thrown at any moment.
“It’ll smooth out as soon as we pass this row of breakers,” Brogan said genially.
“I’m fine,” Emma admitted, both surprised by that fact and a little embarrassed she’d had to state it. Brogan, of course, was right. After a handful of small bumps, the water became little more than rippled glass.
She shouldn’t have worried. She hated that she had. And yet Brogan hadn’t poked fun or rolled her eyes at Emma’s over-reaction. She’d merely modeled calmness and reassured her. She couldn’t remember the last time someone had done either of those things for her.
No, she did remember. Her grandmother had been the picture of understanding. Her grandmother, who’d grown up on the very shore she was now sailing along. Emma let her eyes wander over the stunning landscape before her, the azure sea, the golden strip of beach rising in verdant dunes, and for the first time thoughts of her grandmother weren’t accompanied by a wave of sadness. “It’s beautiful out here.”
Brogan nodded and looked over her shoulder. “Not a bad view of the village, is it?”
She took in the outline of stone buildings with red and brown roofs atop a rise, all peaks and angles with a church spire to keep watch over them all. “You hav
e a gift for understatement.”
“I’m sure you’ve been a lot more places than I have and seen a lot more amazing things.”
“I have been able to travel a bit,” she admitted. “My work has opened a lot of doors, but I’m not sure any of them has anything prettier than this.”
Brogan looked down as if she’d found something important to do with the steering handle on the outboard motor, but Emma liked the way the corners of her mouth twitched up with pleasure.
“My grandmother used to tell me stories about this place,” Emma continued. “As a little girl, I thought it must be the most magical spot on earth, but as an adult, I’d started to wonder if she’d embellished her descriptions, either for my benefit or for her own.”
“And?” Brogan asked, rising to fiddle with some ropes near the mast. “Did she?”
“Not a bit,” Emma said, with a rush of affection, both for the place and the woman who’d loved it. “Not the views anyway. Or the colors, or the way the buildings stagger and stutter-step toward the sea.”
Brogan finished loosening a knot, then turned to face her, green eyes flecked with hope and a hint of mischief. “What about the magic?”
The question lodged in her chest, or maybe it wasn’t the words that made it hard to draw a full breath so much as the way in which they were delivered, or the person who delivered them. Either way, Emma couldn’t find the air or the wherewithal to answer right away. Instead she looked out to sea, over the azure expanse, toward an island in the distance until the words came to her. “I thought I’d found some magic a long time ago, but I was wrong, or maybe I was unworthy, so I’m not sure I’ve even been looking for it lately.”
“But you still believe it exists?” Brogan asked quietly.
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