Soon we could glimpse the bottom through the water and the shallower it got, the more she relaxed. Before we got to the middle of the bay, I had to stop: it was no deeper than twenty feet and as shallow as six in places. I’d have to take the launch in. Not a problem in itself but….
“What?”
I’d been brooding at the rail and Hannah had noticed. I shook my head and rechecked the map. The location was right but you get a feel for these things, after enough years. And it didn’t feel right.
She came closer. “What’s the matter?” God, that sweet country accent. Cornfields and butterflies and messing around in the creek.
“It’s too shallow,” I said. “The Hawk was big. A wreck that big, this close to an island, and no one’s found it in three hundred years?”
“You think the map’s wrong?” I could see the sudden fear in her eyes. “You think it might be a fake after all?”
“Only one way to find out. I’ll go down and take a look.”
She moved towards the door that led below deck. “You need me to pass you something? A wetsuit? One of those big air tanks?”
I loved the fact she was ready to jump in and help. I’d taken a few tourists out, back when I was getting started with Edwards and we needed the money, and they’d sat on their asses the whole time. “No. It’s shallow. Can you just get me a mask and snorkel, and some flippers?” I almost said please but managed to bite it back. Didn’t want her to think I was soft for her.
I stood there waiting as she hunted for the gear. It would have been quicker to just fetch it myself but…
But I didn’t want to hurt her feelings. When did I start worrying about people’s feelings?
She emerged, triumphant, and handed me the gear. I untied the launch and was just about to set off when she said, “Be careful.”
I blinked at her. I couldn’t remember the last time someone had worried about me. The guys at McKinley’s were probably running a book, each time I took the ship out, on whether I’d come back. They all knew I was ready for the sea to take me.
I grunted.
I cast off and started pulling on the oars. To get to the middle of the bay, I had to row all the way along the side of the boat and I couldn’t take my eyes off Hannah as she stood on the deck, her golden hair blowing in the wind. God, she was beautiful. She really was from another world: I could imagine her standing in a wheat field: all she needed was a summer dress to complete the picture. She’d look fantastic in a dress.
She was keeping her gaze firmly fixed on the island but, every few moments, she’d check over her shoulder towards the sea, as if fearing the waves were going to creep up and swamp her. And the further I rowed away, the more uneasy she got. She doesn’t want to be on her own, not with the sea so close.
I shook my head, furious with myself. We don’t have time for this. But....
“Hannah!” I barked. My accent was hard around that soft “H.”
She ran to the front of the boat.
“You going to be alright?” I almost spat it out, trying my best to be gruff. But I couldn’t stop the concern that crept into my voice.
“Fine,” she said. “I’ll just stay here and re—” She broke off as if remembering something. She glanced at the waves. “I’ll be fine,” she said firmly. But when a particularly big wave rocked the boat, her head snapped around to look like a deer who’s heard the hunter.
The launch was just drifting past the prow of the boat. I made a decision, grabbed on, and held the launch there. “Grab another set of gear,” I told her. “You’re coming with me.”
Her eyes went wide. “What? I can’t go—”
“It’s six feet deep,” I told her. “It’s about as dangerous as a puddle. You’ll be fine.”
I saw her wavering, trying to decide, her gaze flicking back and forth between the waves behind her and the calm waters of the bay ahead of her. She didn’t want to be in the water at all….
...but it was the sea she was afraid of. She nodded and ran below. A moment later, she reappeared holding a mask, snorkel, and flippers. I prepared to row all the way back to the rear of the boat to pick her up but she shook her head and clambered over the rail at the prow. I quickly dropped the oars and grabbed her feet, guiding her into the launch as she slithered down. Not many women—or men—would have tried that. She might be scared of the sea but she wasn’t lacking in guts.
I swallowed. As she’d slithered in, my hands had slid up her legs and now I was holding her just above the knees. I looked up at the exact moment she looked down. Our eyes met.
“Take a seat,” I muttered, trying not to think about how silky smooth her skin felt, or how those legs would feel stroking against mine as we thrashed and twisted in a bed. She sat, I picked up the oars, and we set off.
18
Hannah
My heart was still thumping at the thought of going into the water but anything was better than sitting on the boat on my own, with endless horizon on three sides of me and the waves tipping the deck. The bay was different. It was so sheltered, there were barely any waves. And the bottom was so close I’d be able to touch it with my toes in places. It was water...but it didn’t feel like the sea.
My underwear had dried so I’d slipped it on when I went below deck. I took off the borrowed shorts but Rourke warned me to leave the t-shirt on so my back didn’t burn in the fierce sun. He showed me how to put the flippers and mask on and how the snorkel sealed itself if I dived below the surface. Then we jumped in together, the sea turning into white clouds of bubbles for a second. Then the bubbles cleared and….
I blinked behind my mask. I was in a whole new world.
I’d thought the water was clear when I was above the surface but now, without all the reflections, it was amazing. I was gazing down on lilac and topaz and sunset-orange coral. I could see a huge red crab crossing sideways beneath me and a clam the size of my head. I looked to my left and there was a bright yellow fish only inches from my mask, not scared at all: curious, in fact. It came right up to my face as if looking at its reflection in the glass, its fins dancing in the current. I’d never seen anything so beautiful. I could feel my eyes bugging out. This was all down here, the whole time?
Two-thirds of the Earth’s surface is water. And I’d been just flying over it in planes.
The best thing was, there was none of that sense of panic and fear that I’d always thought was part of swimming. I’m a good swimmer but, subconsciously, I’d still always felt I was fighting the water, fighting to breathe. Here...I could just let my body go limp and float on the surface. The sun was dreamily warm on my back, I could breathe just fine through the snorkel and I only had to bat my toes a little for the flippers to push me through the warm water. It was effortless.
I knew we had no time to waste. Katherine had less than a week and I was already on borrowed time. But I couldn’t help thinking that I never did anything like this, back in Nebraska. I was actually living, not just following the same routine every day.
We started to circle, searching for the wreck. Rourke went in front so, for the first time, I had a chance to really study him without him seeing. Again, he seemed more at home in the water than he ever did on land, his muscled back and shoulders letting him power through the water, his legs kicking in long, expert strokes. Only when the light caught his left calf did I see the jagged, messy scar there. That must be what gave him the limp. And there were other scars, too, on his forearms and upper arms. Thin, raised lines that could have been knife cuts. And small, circular marks. Are those bullet wounds?
Rourke suddenly sped up and I hurried to keep pace. We were coming to a point where the coral rose up, blocking our view of what was ahead. It was the only direction we hadn’t checked. The wreck must be there!
I kicked hard and pulled alongside Rourke. We swum over the top of the rise...and stopped.
I looked left and right and then stared at Rourke in dismay.
We could see for hundreds of yards in eve
ry direction. But there was no wreck.
19
Hannah
I’d grabbed Rourke’s shoulder before I was even aware of it, fingers digging into the hard muscle. He was already turning to meet my big, panicked eyes. Where is it?! I tried to communicate.
To my horror, he gave a rueful shake of his head. I don’t know.
I surfaced, tearing off my mask and pulling the end of the snorkel from my lips. I was bombarding Rourke with questions almost before he had his head above water. “Are we in the wrong place?” I wanted to know. “Was the map fake?” My voice was rising and a chill was soaking through my whole body, pushing back the warmth of the water. “Where is it?!” My mind was spinning. Katherine! Oh God, Katherine! If we don’t find it….
His hands grabbed my shoulders, warm through the wet fabric of the t-shirt. He didn’t say anything for a moment but his eyes commanded calm. I went quiet, but my breathing was still fast and ragged.
His fingers squeezed me gently, his hands big enough to surround my whole shoulders with heat. “I don’t know,” he said. “But we’re going to keep looking until we find it.”
I stared up at him. I knew he must be worried too but there wasn’t a trace of it in his eyes. He was unshakeable. Everything is going to be alright. I felt it again: that authority, that leadership. The ability to tell his men they were heading into the storm and they were going to survive it: and to have them believe him. Where had he got that? Not just from commanding a ship full of divers hunting treasure, surely?
My heart slowed a little and I nodded. He gave my shoulders a last squeeze and then released me.
This time, we dived down to the bottom. I was nervous at first but soon got used to holding my breath: all I had to do when I needed to breathe was swim up and poke the snorkel above the water and I could fill my lungs again. We were only about ten feet below the surface and with the bright sunshine above and the warm, clear water it was no more threatening than a swimming pool.
I copied Rourke, grabbing handfuls of the coral and using it to pull myself along, keeping my eyes open for anything that looked like part of a ship. But there was nothing, not a single rotting timber. Could it have rotted away to nothing? Are we in the wrong place?
I was on my fifth dive when I thought I saw something: a hump in the coral that didn’t look like the rest. Curving, but roughly rectangular. There was a hole in the coral nearby and I grabbed the lip of it to pull myself closer. My fingers nudged something inside and it moved.
I looked down at the hole and saw two green glowing eyes in the blackness. What the hell’s that?
It erupted from the hole. Its silver-green body was as thick as my thigh and it was long: it just kept coming out of the hole, at least six feet of it. Its jaws opened and I had a glimpse of needle-like teeth. Then they snapped shut and I howled in pain, my hand buried in its mouth up to the wrist.
20
Rourke
Shit! A Green Moray Eel, and a big one.
I raced towards her. Hannah was desperately trying to pull her arm out but eels have vicious, backward-faced teeth designed to stop you doing exactly that. Already, I could see blood clouding the water: luckily, I hadn’t seen any sharks so far. Hannah started twisting around but the eel was clamped on tight. All she was doing was using up her air.
I reached her just as she gave up and tried to swim to the surface to take a breath. But the eel weighed a good sixty pounds: maybe she could have dragged it up there if she could swim with both arms, but she could only use one. And it was strong: it kept pulling and jerking at her, spinning her around and dragging her back down. As I reached her, her kicking foot hit me in the face, then in the ribs: she was in a blind panic, her eyes bulging as her lungs screamed for air.
I froze for a split-second, staring at her. I knew that look, that mortal fear as someone fights to breathe.
Then I snapped out of it, pulled my dive knife from its sheath on my ankle, and brought the hilt down with all my force on the eel’s head. It went limp. But it was still dead weight pulling her down. We were too far from the surface. She needed air now.
I grabbed Hannah’s face in both hands, pressed my lips to hers, and exhaled into her mouth. I felt her lungs fill and her panic eased a little.
Then I grabbed hold of the eel and slashed with my knife, cutting it off below the head. The body fell away and, free of its weight, Hannah kicked for the surface. I put my arm around her waist and helped her and we surfaced together, gasping and panting.
As soon as I saw the tears in her eyes, it did something to me. My chest contracted and nothing else mattered. “Shh,” I told her. “Shh, it’s okay. Let me look.”
She turned away, closing her eyes, and held up her hand. I took hold of the eel’s head and pushed it up her wrist instead of trying to pull it down and off. She grunted in pain but then let out a shuddering breath as its teeth came free. I forced its jaws wide, pulled it off her and threw it away, then examined her wrist. It wasn’t too bad: red pinpricks where the teeth had sunk in but nothing was broken or torn. “You’ll be fine,” I told her. “Let’s get back to the ship and I’ll dress it.”
Hannah nodded. Then: “No. Wait. I saw something, just before it bit me.”
I stared at her. Her wrist would be fine but I’d been bitten a few times by those things and I knew it must hurt like a bastard. “I’ll find it,” I told her.
She shook her head. “No. I know what I’m looking for. And everything looks the same down there: what if we can’t find it again?”
I blinked, astonished. She had a point. But I couldn’t believe she wanted to go back down there, after what just happened.
We stared at each other. Her eyes were big with fear but that lower lip I was getting to love so much jutted out, determined. She didn’t want to go down there...but she was going to do it anyway.
I nodded, impressed. She put her snorkel in place, took a few breaths to get her breathing under control and then we dived. For a few seconds she was uncertain, trying to get her bearings. Then she swam towards what looked like just another patch of coral.
I wouldn’t have spotted it myself. The thing was so covered in coral that it was almost perfectly camouflaged. But as I reached it, I saw the hump of the lid and a hint of ancient brown wood.
A chest.
21
Hannah
The chest was light enough until we got it above the surface, then suddenly felt like it was made of lead. I climbed into the launch and then reached down to help Rourke lift it in. My wrist was still bleeding but I ignored it. My heart was hammering: is this it? A little voice in my head was telling me that it made no sense: where was the wreck? And the letter told of a trunk, not a small chest. But I wanted to believe.
I was trying to convince myself because, if the cure wasn’t in the chest, Katherine and I and all the other women with the disease were finished.
Back aboard the Fortune’s Hope, we laid the chest down on the deck and knelt in front of it. Rourke broke away the corroded metal clasp with his knife. Put his hand on the lid.
I braced myself, holding my breath. And realized he was holding his breath, too.
He wanted it to be the cure. He wanted it as much as me.
Rourke swung back the lid and my eyes scoured the contents. Once, it might have been packed with velvet or some other cloth to protect the contents, but that had rotted away long ago. All that was left was a small glass bottle. I snatched it up. Thick, scalloped glass blurred what was inside. But there was something inside. The cure!
The top was sealed with red wax. Rourke passed me his knife and I used the tip to dig it away. Then I tipped the contents into my hand. A roll of cloth and something hard and dark. My heart leapt.
But it wasn’t the black, curious stone my ancestor had described. It was a ruby the size of my thumbnail. I was dimly aware that it must be worth a fortune...but right now, I would have gladly swapped it for the cure. “What?” I asked, my voice tight.
&nbs
p; I unrolled the cloth in case the cure was hidden inside. But there was only a message. Esme, I recognized at the top. And at the bottom it was signed, C. I squinted: the handwriting was spidery and difficult to read and the language was a mixture of Spanish and old English. It ended with “and look in our secret garden.”
I turned to Rourke. “Where’s the wreck? Where’s the treasure? Where’s the cure?!” I shook the message. “What does this mean?!”
He gently took the ruby from me and turned it over in his hand. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “But I know a guy who will.”
“Where? Back in Nassau?”
He shook his head and stood up. “We’re going to Cuba.”
22
Hannah
I always get nervous, going through customs and immigration. Even just flying into Nassau with nothing more threatening than my bagful of books, I’d broken into a cold sweat as I walked past the security guards. Now I had to get into Cuba with no passport, no visa, and wearing oversized men’s clothes. My legs were trembling as we walked up to the port guard.
But Rourke just stalked straight down the middle of the pier, scowling and limping and carrying a large box. The guard scurried to meet him, as if Rourke was the one in authority.
There was a rapid-fire conversation. Most of it was too quick for me to follow, but Rourke seemed very concerned with whether the authorities were taking proper care of their guards, these days, and sounded shocked to hear how many mouths the poor man had to feed. Rourke wished he could help but all he had was this case of twelve bottles of finest bourbon which needed to be surrendered to the authorities since it wasn’t legal to import it. Oh! The guard could see that it got to the right people? How kind of him!
Captain Rourke Page 10
