Whispers of Heaven (23 page)

The sea was cold, Lucas thought with calm detachment as he turned his head and sucked a quick gasp of life-giving air into his lungs, although not as cold as the northern seas that wrapped the green and rocky shores of Ireland.

After the first shock of submersion, he struck out quickly, legs kicking, arms slicing with practiced precision through the surging waves. The wind and the tide were both against him, driving him back toward shore, but he had expected that, had known that each wave would become a rolling black wall to be crested, beaten. Rain pounded his shoulders, pockmarked the raging sea around him. He could see the rocks, looming up dark and jagged on his left, hear the violent explosion of the waves striking stone with a force that sent spume soaring into the sky. The fierce currents of the cove sucked at his body, tugged him closer to the towering cliffs than he wanted to be yet. He could see the hull of the ketch, ahead of him, but the pull of the rocks was powerful and deadly and dangerously seductive. It would be so easy, so very easy to end it all here, now...

Except that if he gave up now, three children would die, alone and frightened. Lucas knew what it felt like, to be alone and afraid. And so he fought. Fought both the sea and the temptation simply to cease struggling and let the storm take him. The ketch was very near now, its sleek brown hull rolling with each kick of wind and wave. He lifted his head, shaking hair and water from his eyes as he focused his salt- blurred vision on the companion ladder. He would be given no second chance. If he missed the ladder, he would be swept into the rocks, whether he willed it or not.

He kicked hard, arms cutting through the curling white tops of the ugly swelling waves, every muscle straining for strength and control. The noise was deafening, the creaking of the dying ship's timbers added to the howling roar of wind and rain and breaking surf. The sea eddied treacherously around him, sucked him toward the rocks. He fought with all his strength, and still the sea took him, an unexpected splash of cold, salty water filling his eyes and his mouth and his lungs. For one wild, terrible moment, he thought he'd misjudged. Then the cold swirling current gave one last tug, and released him.

His flailing hand sought the nearest rung, caught it. Slowly, he hauled himself upward, hand over hand, the cold wind shuddering his wet body, his muscles unexpectedly weak and quivering, so that he found it hard to pull himself up and over the low rail. He slithered to the wet, lurching deck, his breath coming in painful gasps, his hands braced against his thighs, his head bowed as he coughed up water.

"Sir," said a small voice.

Lucas flung up his head, his chest still heaving with the effort of drawing air into his strained lungs, and found himself staring into the anxious gray eyes of a sharp-faced boy of perhaps eleven or twelve years of age. Behind him stood a second child, a girl of something like eight, clutching against her side another little girl of four or five, sobbing. Like her brother, the older girl was wide-eyed and stiff with awe- inspiring control, given her situation.

"Sir," said the boy again, his wet body shuddering with cold and shock, even as he somehow managed to keep most of what he was feeling off his face. "Have you come to help us?"

Genevieve Strzlecki stood at the rain-pounded shoreline and watched Jessie, watching her groom.

She waited at the edge of the raging surf, a tall girl with a wet tangle of golden hair clinging to her shoulders, her skirts dark and limp with sea and rainwater, her back held painfully stiff as she stared out over the heaving, deadly waves. A giant, white-curled breaker smashed against the beach, drenching her with frigid salt water, and she barely flinched, every fiber of her being concentrated on the man who swam toward near- certain death.

Oh, Jessie, thought Genevieve, wading into the swirling water to stand beside her. Not that man. Not that wild Irishman with his dark good looks and doomed future. Not him.

Jessie's hand reached out, suddenly, to clasp Genevieve's.
"There.
See? He's made it," she said with a gasp that brought Genevieve's arm about her waist to hold her up as she sagged with relief. "He made it."

"He's made it to the ship," said Genevieve, hugging her young friend close as they watched the Irishman disappear over the ship's rail. "Now he's going to have to swim back."

CHAPTER NINETEEN

A massive wave rammed into the side of the ketch, sending up a plume of spray and causing the wet deck beneath Gallagher's feet to lurch ominously. Overhead, the remaining masts swayed against the gray, lightning-charged sky with a creaking groan that caught the boy's attention. He looked up, a quick, scared breath shuddering his chest as he watched some of the mainmast's rigging snap and come down with a rending crash that could have killed them, had they been standing beneath it.

"The ship's breaking up, isn't it?" he asked stiffly.

"Yes," said Lucas, reaching out one hand to grip the boy's thin, cold shoulder. "What's your name, son?"

"Taylor, sir. Taylor Chantry."

Gallagher let his gaze drift around the ruined, rain-washed deck, with its scattered rigging and shattered mizzenmast and broken planks. The impact with the rock had loosed the livestock from their pens, so that the air filled with the squeal of pigs and the bawling of frightened cattle. "I thought there was a seaman with you."

"There was," said Taylor. "He jumped overboard and tried to swim to shore when the cables snapped. I don't think he made it."

"Excuse me, sir," said the older girl, looking up at Lucas and blinking as the rain ran in her eyes. "But how are you going to get us to shore without a boat?" "

"What's your name?" Lucas asked, turning to the girl and giving her what he hoped came out as a smile. She had dark blond hair, like her mother and little sister, and her brother's pointed chin. She was thin and wet and cold, and in another half hour, she might be dead.

"Mary," she said.

"How old are you, Mary?"

"I'm eight."

Lucas hunkered down to bring himself to the child's eye level. The wind shrieked, fluttering the girls' straggling hair and torturing Lucas's wet, tired body. "You're a very brave young woman, Mary. How old is your sister here?"

Mary tightened her grip on the little girl's shaking shoulders. "She's four. Her name is Harriet."

"I'll tell you what I'm going to do, Mary. I'm going to try to swim to shore with you."

"Swim, sir? But..." Mary's chin quivered, then held firm. "I can't swim."

"You won't need to. I'm going to swim with you and your sister tied to my back."
Which means that if I go down, I'll drag you to the bottom with me,
he thought, although he didn't tell her that. Without him, the little girls wouldn't stand much of a chance in these seas, anyway.

"All you'll need to do," he told the rigid little girl, "is hold your head out of the water and keep Harriet here from wrapping her arms around my neck and strangling me." He captured Mary's frightened gray gaze, and held it. "Do you think you can do that?"

She hesitated, considering what he was asking her to do, and he admired her all the more for it. He threw a quick glance toward the beach. A faint light glimmered through the gloom, and he realized the people there must somehow have managed to get a fire going. Feeble as it was, it would help.

Mary blew her breath out in a slow, oddly adult sigh. "I can try, sir. But what about Taylor?"

Gallagher looked up at the boy beside them. "Can you swim?"

Taylor swallowed hard. "Yes, sir." A wave exploded against the hull with a crash that drenched them all and set the ketch to rocking dangerously. The boy flinched. "But not in a sea like this."

Straightening, Lucas unsheathed the knife he kept strapped to his calf and went to work cutting a length of the scattered wet rope. "Listen to me, Taylor. The only thing holding this ketch up right now is the very rock that punched a hole in her bottom. Any minute, some wave is going to knock us off that rock into deep water, and she's going to sink like she's got lead shot for ballast. One way or another, you're going to end up in the sea." He turned, two strips of rope in his hands. "Believe me, you don't want to be on this ship when it goes down."

Taylor blinked up at him. "I don't think I can do it, sir."

Lucas tied the ropes with quick, practiced movements around the girls' waists. "All right. I'll take your sisters, and then come back for you."

Wordlessly, Taylor stared out over the surging, wind- whipped, rain-battered seas, toward that faint beacon of light on the beach. A violent gust of wind slammed against the ship, thundering a loose sail and bringing down more rigging. Beneath their feet, the deck pitched and groaned. It was obvious that, even if Lucas had the strength and endurance to make such a trip twice, the ketch probably wouldn't hold together long enough for him to swim out a second time, and the boy seemed to know it. He gritted his teeth and gulped hard enough to send his small Adam's apple bobbing up and down. "I'll do it, sir."

Lucas bent down to allow Mary and Harriet to scramble onto him, piggyback fashion. "You go first," he said, quickly. "We'll be right behind you."

The boy made it over the pitching railing and down the slippery companionway ladder. But at the bottom, he stopped, the waves licking his ankles, his eyes wide and dark.

"Take a deep breath, and let go," Lucas said calmly.

The boy dangled there, his fingers white with the strain of clutching the rope.
"I can't!"

Beside them, the ketch heaved up, then slipped sideways with a great tearing of timbers that almost threw Lucas, off balanced as he was by the girls' weight, into the water. "You can do it, Taylor. I'll be right beside you. I'll try to help you as much as I can. Now go."

The ship lurched again, and Lucas knew they were off the rock and floating free. They could hear the sound of water rushing into the smashed hull, fast and deadly. "Listen to me, Taylor. You have to do this. Now.
Let go."

The boy sucked in a deep, desperate breath of air, squeezed his eyes shut, and let go.

Jesmond Corbett stood on the beach of Shipwreck Cove and watched the ketch slip from the jagged rocks that had killed it. The ship swung about sharply, shuddering and sucking as the viciously cold water rushed in to fill its bowels. With a suddenness that was both awe-inspiring and frightening, it plummeted down, the strain of the descent tearing it asunder with a groaning scream that mingled with the rumble of thunder and the smash of the surf. Then all that could be seen was a frothy expanse of debris-clogged, seething sea churned by the frantic thrashing of squealing pigs and lowing cattle, and two dark forms that might or might not have been human.

Her body wet and chilled, her heart pounding painfully in her chest, Jessie watched them come at her through the powerfully breaking waves, a familiar dark-headed, lithe body with strongly reaching arms, which stopped every now and then to urge on its smaller, frailer shadow. Sometimes they would disappear from her vision for endless agonizing seconds at a time when they sank into a deep trough between waves, and she would wait, with the wind lifting her scraggly hair and the rain wet on her face, for them to reappear, borne up on the crest of the next sweeping wall of gray water.

It would be easier for him now, she reasoned, easier to swim with the tide and the wind—except, of course, for the double burden he carried on his back, and his care for the child who flailed gamely in his wake. The nobility of what he had done, of what he was doing—the sheer, bloody-minded majesty and guts of it—stole her breath, leaving her feeling both proud and oddly humbled. The wind howled around her, driving the next wave to strike the beach with a thunderous spray. Water ran down her cheeks; she tasted salt on her lips, and knew it was not all from the sea.

"I don't see them," said Genevieve, beside her, staring out over the incoming sweep of white-tipped waves.

"There,"
said Jessie, the breath leaving her body in a joyous rush when she saw the dark, heavily burdened figure emerging from the foam-flecked gray water that broke against the shore. "Oh, thank God. He's all right.
He's all right"

A strange emotion welled within her, an emotion powerful and unfamiliar and only dimly understood. Behind her, farther up the beach where someone had rigged up a shelter, the bonfire crackled and hissed, filling the salty air with the tang of wood smoke. People were shouting, running, dark sodden forms moving across dark wet sand, yet she might have been alone. Alone with the low bunching clouds and the soaring cliffs of the cove and the man emerging, exhausted, his face drawn, his naked chest heaving, his back bent beneath his burden as he rose from the storm-wracked sea. Rain ran down her face, soaked through her sodden clothes. The sea roared in her ears. She took one hesitant step forward; then she was flinging herself into the surf, her heart soaring with a wildly intense joy, her legs splashing through the spent waves swirling over the sand. The long green velvet train of her riding habit floated out behind her on the brine, hampering each step, slowing her down. So exultant was her heart, so intent was she on reaching this man, that she was only dimly aware of a voice calling her from behind. Then a hand closed above her elbow hard enough to check her forward momentum and draw her half around.

She found herself staring into Genevieve's wise blue eyes. "Have a care, Jessie. There are too many here on this beach who would see, and remember, and talk."

A wave broke against them, deluging Jessie with a cold shock. A man pushed past her, a small, officious man in a naval officer's uniform who was barking orders. Other men and women crowded around them, enlarged her world with awful suddenness to remind her of who she was and where she was and what she must not do. She drew the cold, damp air into her lungs and nodded, her gaze still locked with Genevieve's. There was no time, now, to ask how Genevieve had known.

"The boy's right behind me," she heard Gallagher say, his voice shaky and spent. "Help him. Quickly."