Captain Rourke

by Helena Newbury

  “The body’s not meant to bear that sort of load,” the doctor in charge of her case told us. “Not for more than a few seconds. Not four minutes.” He told us his best guess: the attacks would keep getting stronger and more frequent until they were constant. At that point, her heart would simply give out.

  “How long?” asked Katherine. “No bull.”

  The doctor gave us the sad stare of a man defeated.

  “Months?” asked Katherine, her voice cracking. Then, “Weeks?”

  The doctor closed his eyes for a second. “A week.”

  And that’s when my dad finally told us.

  His big farmer’s hands were bunched as he spoke. He’d worked the land his whole life, seen us through countless hard winters and drought-ridden summers. He’d never liked anything he couldn’t touch and feel: he was one of those guys who sows by the feel of the soil, not by the calendar. When he told us, I wanted to throw my arms around him because this was about as far from his comfort zone as it was possible to get.

  “They called it a curse,” he said. “But it’s not. Let’s get that straight. There’s no such thing. Just folk back then didn’t know medicine like they do now.”

  “Back when?” I asked.

  “1700s,” he said. “Best as we can figure. One of your ancestors, a woman, fell ill and….she died. No one knew why. Then her daughter fell ill, when she reached the same age, and she died. Then two of her daughters. That’s when people started to say it was a curse.” He swallowed. “The men in the family were all fine. And the other daughters. It only hit certain women and always in their early twenties.”

  The cogs were turning in my head. “Great-grandma Ellie?” I knew she’d died when she was young. I’d never met her.

  My dad nodded. “Ellie was the last one. Your grandma’s generation was fine. Your mom’s generation was fine.” He reached out and stroked Katherine’s cheek. “That’s why we never told you. We thought it was just superstition and coincidence: lots of women died young, in those days. We never—” His face threatened to crumple and he had to stop speaking.

  A disease that killed through sheer, unbearable pain. A time bomb buried in our genes. I wanted to be sick. It wasn’t just Katherine: we had seven female cousins roughly her age. How many of them was this thing going to hit? How many of their kids?

  Over the next few days we met with a whole string of doctors, all with genetics somewhere in their job title. “But we know what this is,” I kept saying. “It’s some genetic defect, passed down the female line. It’s in our chromosomes. You understand that stuff these days. You can treat it.”

  The latest doctor looked at me sadly. “There are a lot of abnormalities we can’t detect. We know this is in your family’s DNA but that doesn’t mean we know where...or how it’s attacking the nervous system.”

  “There’s got to be something,” I told my dad savagely that night. We’d already lost Mom. I wasn’t going to lose Katherine, too.

  My dad put his arms around me. “I looked, pumpkin.” He kissed the top of my head. “When you were born, I drove myself crazy trying to figure out if this thing was true or not. Talked to everyone. Even your great-grandpa called me up when he heard we’d had a daughter, trying to sell me on his theory.”

  I frowned. “Doesn’t he live in Hawaii or something?”

  “The Bahamas. Went out there after Ellie died.”

  “What was his theory?”

  Dad squeezed me harder. ‘Losing Ellie drove him crazy. That’s why he went out there: he thought there was a cure there. He couldn’t bring back Ellie, but he wanted to beat this thing, make sure it didn’t hurt anyone else. He’s been out there ever since. He must be in his nineties by now.”

  I looked at our reflections in the glass, searching his face. “But why there? Was there some magical plant that only grew there or something?”

  I felt Dad shake his head. “He’d researched our family tree. Claimed some woman had been cured, hundreds of years ago. Spent all his money looking for what cured her. Even asked me for money.”

  “We should talk to him!”

  He squeezed me. “He’s a crazy old coot. And whatever he thought was out there, he never found it: you can be sure he would have told us, if he had.” He sighed. “I’m not even sure he’s still alive. Haven’t heard from him in twenty years. The phone was disconnected, last time I tried.”

  I pushed back so that I could look at him. “I could go out there—”

  “No!” His voice was so firm, I blinked. And then I saw it in his eyes. Mom was gone. Katherine was critically ill. I was all he had left.

  I clutched him to me and we stood like that for a long time. He buried his face in my hair and, a few seconds later, I felt a couple of tears hit my scalp.

  I’d never seen him cry, not even when Mom died. I think that scared me more than anything the doctors had said. This was real. Katherine was going to die. And then this thing was going to start picking off our cousins.

  Unless someone did something. And the only hope lay in the Bahamas.

  Katherine couldn’t go and she needed her boyfriend here with her. No way would my dad leave and Mom was gone. That left me.

  If I go and she dies while I’m away….

  If I don’t go and she dies….

  After three hours pacing the hospital hallways, I was no closer to a decision. Then, in the early hours, Katherine screamed. I ran to her bedside and she crushed my hand in hers while she arched off the bed in agony. I watched her through a haze of tears. “Make it stop!” she screamed. “Make it stop!”

  And all the hot emotion rose up inside me and hardened into iron. As soon as the attack was over, I packed a bag and drove to the airport.

  Maybe my great-grandfather was crazy. Maybe there was no cure. And even if there was something in the Bahamas that could save Katherine, I was about the least suitable person in the world to go looking: a small-town librarian who’d only been out of the state a handful of times.

  But I was damn well going to try.

  I reached the woman just as she reached the door to my great-grandfather’s house. When I touched her shoulder, she yelped and spun around. The box she’d been carrying clattered to the floor and cleaning products went everywhere.

  “Sorry,” I panted. I bent and started picking up spray-bottles and dusters. “I’m Hannah Barnes. I’m looking for my great-grandfather, Bertrand?”

  The woman’s jaw dropped. Then she grabbed my hand and stared into my eyes. She was smaller than me, but sturdily built, her graying hair held in place by combing shaped like orange butterflies. “Oh, heavens, child!” she whispered. She tugged me forward and I suddenly found myself crushed against her bosom. “I’m so sorry.”

  My stomach twisted in fear. “Where is he?”

  She stroked my back. “Bertie passed last week.”

  I froze against her. I’d come all this way for nothing... and now Katherine had no hope at all.

  3

  Hannah

  The woman brewed me tea and insisted I call her Cynthia. She’d been my great-grandfather’s housekeeper for thirty years.

  I’d missed him by three days.

  The house was run down, but still beautiful, with big windows giving views onto the beach and strong wooden shutters for the storm season. There were polished wood floors and an old-fashioned globe. I could imagine some rich colonist living there, back when the New World was just being settled. There was a faint, enticing smell I recognized but couldn’t identify.

  Cynthia had tried to contact our family, but all the contact details Bertrand had for us were years out of date. He hadn’t stayed in touch with anyone in Nebraska. Whatever he’d been doing out here, it had obsessed him to the exclusion of everything else.

  Cynthia began to clean and, ignoring her protests, I grabbed a mop and helped her. “Do you know what he was working on?” I asked.

  She shook her head and nodded to a door. “He was never out of that study. Worked dawn till
midnight. But he never told me what it was.”

  I sighed and started figuring out how fast I could get back to Katherine. The next flight to the mainland wasn’t for a few hours. I wanted to howl in frustration. By the time I got home, I’d have missed a full day and night of what little time she had left. You idiot! Dad told you not to come!

  I helped Cynthia clean the rest of the house, figuring I might as well be useful to someone. She left me with a set of keys and I slumped down on the cracked leather couch to call a cab. I still had a while before my flight, but I figured I might as well wait at the airport. At least there I’d be further from the sea.

  That made me think of him. The man on the beach. The one who seemed to love the water as much as I hated it. My opposite.

  I relived that slow journey up his body again. Those muscles. Those eyes. That bulge in his shorts—surely not from staring down at me? I swallowed, remembering his gaze and the heat it had sent through me.

  Don’t be stupid. Men don’t even look at me, let alone men like him. He was gorgeous and that whole beach was packed with slender beauties in designer bikinis. He probably took his pick of every tourist flight.

  And yet... it hadn’t felt like that. He’d looked almost angry with me, as if this was as out of character for him as it was for me. And beneath the lust, there’d been something else in his eyes, driving all that anger. I recognized it only because I’d seen it in the mirror, right after we lost Mom. Pain. Pain that was tearing him apart.

  I shook my head. Whoever he was, I was never going to see him again. I dialed the cab company and, as the number rang, I gazed up at the cracks in the ceiling. My great-grandfather had obviously spent the bare minimum on maintaining the place. Yet I was sure he and my great-grandmother had been well off, at one point.

  He’d spent all his money on this quest. Every single cent. How? What had cost so much?

  I slowly turned to the study door. Then I looked at the set of keys: one of them must open it.

  I knew he’d died without finding the cure: if he’d found it, he would have rushed back to Nebraska, victorious. I knew I’d come all the way out there on a wild goose chase, but I had to know how close he’d gotten. I had to know if there’d ever been hope, or if it really had all been the delusions of an old man.

  “Triple-A Cabs,” said a friendly voice in my ear.

  I fingered the keys. Make a decision, Hannah….

  “Sorry,” I said. “I’ll call you back.”

  I hung up and walked slowly over to the study door. Found the right key and unlocked it. Then I gingerly pushed it open....

  The smell hit me first. That wonderful scent I’d caught when I walked into the house. The smell of old books. I closed my eyes and inhaled.

  Books are my medicine. They have been ever since Mom died. When I need a lift, I reach for something light and funny. When I need to turn off my brain, I bury myself in a biography.

  When Mom was ripped from us and Katherine was in Omaha and Dad was busy trying to keep the farm going and I needed someone...I immersed myself in an epic, sweeping historical romance box set, book after book until I knew the characters so well that I didn’t feel alone.

  And when I finish a long day at the library, doing everything from indexing to reshelving to sweeping floors because it’s just me and my one, part-time helper...and I know that when I get home I have to help Dad sow a new crop because his back’s giving him trouble again...and after that there’s nothing waiting for me but sleeping in the same room I grew up in, the fairy wallpaper still peeking through the layers of paint I’ve plastered over it...and it’s just me, because there’s no time to see friends let alone think about a boyfriend and who’d want the girl who’s still stuck in the same town after twenty-four years, too poor to move out of her dad’s house, and I’m too shy to talk to them even if they did speak to me and—

  When all that is in my head, I grab a book and escape.

  So working at the library suits me. It’s only recently that I’ve wondered if it suits me too well. Peaceful, but isolating. I look up and the sun’s setting and I try to remember what on earth I did that filled a whole day. If I wrote my life down in a book, would anyone want to read it?

  I opened my eyes.

  The study was filled with books. Thousands and thousands of books.

  The room was huge. Double height, with shelves stretching almost twenty feet into the air. They stretched on to the end of the room, maybe fifty feet away, where I could see a desk.

  I walked reverently between the aisles, gazing in wonder. The newest books were at least a hundred years old: thick, leather bound monsters with gold-printed titles. Many were much older, some just binders of loose, yellowed pages. And there were hundreds and hundreds of them.

  I thought I had a lot of books, but mine only covered two walls of my small bedroom. And my books cost maybe ten dollars a pop. These...I pulled a book from a shelf at random and checked the date: 1732. This one book must be worth thousands....

  And it wasn’t just books. There were piles of letters, some still bearing their glossy wax seals. And maps. New maps, freshly white and blue. Old maps, faded brown. And hand-drawn maps with the names of islands spelled in unfamiliar ways. Many of them seemed to be in Spanish. There were oil paintings, too, not displayed as art but leaned up against the walls as if they were for something.

  I knew now what my great-grandfather had spent all his money on. But why? What did any of this have to do with a cure?

  I bit my lip and looked back at the door I’d come through. If I wanted to get the next flight, I needed to go. By late that night, I could be back with Katherine and my dad.

  But in a week, Katherine would be dead. I looked around the room. Would Bertrand have gone to all this trouble, spent all this money, if there wasn’t at least a tiny shred of hope?

  I closed the door, sat down at Bertrand’s desk and began to read.

  It took me twelve hours. For the first seven, I didn’t leave the desk. Then, back aching and eyes throbbing, I made a huge pot of coffee, refueled and went back in.

  Fortunately, my great-grandfather had kept a journal. That gave me a hint of the story but I had to go back and read all the sources before I could figure it out.

  I had two things on my side. Firstly, a few years ago, Katherine had persuaded me to enroll in a Spanish class because she said it was a great way to meet men. It wasn’t, but I’d enjoyed it and kept going so my Spanish was pretty good.

  Secondly, burying myself in books is what I do.

  Not many people understand it. They see a huge, thick book, one you need two hands to pick up, and they find it intimidating. But to me, that crisp white title page is like a smooth Egyptian cotton sheet. I want a book so big I could lie on the first page. Glowing red hot with my need for story, for information, I’d just burn my way through the pages, sinking down to the end.

  Finally, late that night, I found the crucial stack of letters that made it all make sense. I sat bolt upright in Bertrand’s creaky leather chair.

  Way back in 1701, one of my ancestors, a woman named Elizabeth, had come out to the Bahamas with her husband. She’d fallen ill when she hit her mid-twenties and died within weeks. By that time, she already had two daughters, Isabelle and Margaret.

  By 1722, both of them were approaching the critical age where the “family curse” was said to hit. But Isabelle’s beauty had caught the attention of Marcus, a local merchant, and he started to woo her. Despite everyone’s warnings—including hers—he’d married her when she was twenty-four and set about trying to save her.

  His search took them all over the globe: to doctors in London and Paris, to herbalists in Asia and, finally, to a man in Africa he called a witch-doctor. By now, they were desperate. Isabelle was having attacks, just like my sister, and only had days to live. The man examined her and eventually gave the couple a “curious stone, black as night,” with instructions on how to prepare it. The stone had to be ground up, mixed with oil
and drunk.

  And it had worked. Isabelle’s symptoms disappeared and she went on to live a long life.

  I drew in a ragged breath. There’s a cure!

  Isabelle hadn’t forgotten about her sister. Margaret was now approaching her twenty-fifth birthday and was still in Nassau. I found the letter Marcus wrote to her, describing how he was carefully packaging some of the “curious stone” in a box, packing that box in a trunk and shipping it to her aboard a merchant vessel called the Gwendoline.

  I was literally on the edge of my seat now, the letter gripped in my shaking hand. In those days, a voyage from Lagos in Africa would take almost a month. “But you will receive it in good time,” Marcus reassured her.

  And she would have done. But—

  I snatched up the next letter in the pile.

  Oh Jesus no.

  The ship had never arrived.

  In those days, communication was slow and it was weeks before Margaret received word: the ship had had to divert to another port after suffering some “terrible incident”: its entire cargo had been lost, including the trunk containing the cure. Margaret had written to Marcus and Isabelle but by then they’d travelled to London to start a new life there. Another expedition to Africa was planned but, before it could even set out, the disease hit Margaret. She died just a week later.

  I let out a guttural moan and slumped back in Bertrand’s big leather chair. A cure! They’d actually found a cure, one that could save Katherine and all the other women in our family! I wanted to weep: it was so close I could taste it but, thanks to a storm or a mutiny or whatever had happened to that merchant ship, it was gone forever.

  I gazed around the room in defeat. That was what it all came down to? Bertrand had traced the history of our family back three hundred years, only to discover that we’d been doomed by a cruel twist of fate?

  My eyes stopped on a large table. Spread out on it was a piece of cloth, brown and ragged with age. A hand-drawn map. I couldn’t make sense of all the numbers but I recognized some of the names of the islands: Nassau, Cuba, Haiti. And I could read the message written in flowing script across the bottom. To my darling Esme. The path that leads to the Hawk.