Frenchman's Creek

Chapter X

IT WAS WILLIAM who awoke her, William shaking her arm and whispering in her ear "Forgive me, my lady, but Monsieur has just sent word, the ship sails within the hour." Dona sat up in bed at once, all wish for sleep vanishing with his words, and "Thank you, William," she said, "I shall be ready in twenty minutes' time. What hour is it?"

"A quarter to four, my lady."

He left the room, and Dona, pulling aside the curtains, saw that it was yet dark, the white dawn had not broken. She began to dress hurriedly, her heart beating with excitement and her hands unnaturally clumsy, feeling all the while like a naughty child proceeding to a forbidden venture. It was five days since she had supped with the Frenchman in the creek, and she had not seen him since. Instinct had told her that when he worked he would be alone, and she had let the days go by without walking through the woods to the river, without sending messages even by William, for she knew that when he had laid his plans he would send for her. The wager was not a momentary thing of folly, broached on a summer's night and forgotten before morning, it was a pact by which he would abide, a testing of her strength, a challenge to her courage. Sometimes she thought of Harry, continuing with his life in London, his riding, his gaming, the visits to the taverns, the playhouses, the card-parties with Rockingham, and the images she conjured seemed to her those of another world, a world which concerned her not at all. It belonged, in its strange fashion, to a past that was dead and gone, while Harry himself had become a kind of ghost, a phantom figure walking in another time.

The other Dona was dead too, and this woman who had taken her place was someone who lived with greater intensity, with greater depth, bringing to every thought and every action a new richness of feeling, and an appreciation, half sensuous in its quality, of all the little things that came to make her day.

The summer was a joy and a glory in itself, the bright mornings picking flowers with the children, and wandering with them in the fields and in the woods, and the long afternoons, lazy and complete, when she would lie on her back under the trees, aware of the scent of whin, of broom, of bluebells. Even the simple things, the basic acts of eating, drinking, sleeping, had become, since she had been at Navron, a source of pleasure, of lazy still enjoyment.

No, the Dona of London had gone for ever, the wife who lay beside her husband in that great canopied bed in their house in St. James's Street, with the two spaniels scratching in their baskets on the floor, the window opened to the stuffy laden air and the harsh street cries of chair-menders and apprentice boys-that Dona belonged to another existence.

The clock in the courtyard struck four, and the new Dona, in an old gown long laid aside to be bestowed upon a cottager, with a shawl about her shoulders, and a bundle in her hands, crept down the stairway to the dining-hall, where William awaited her, a taper in his hand.

"Pierre Blanc is outside, in the woods, my lady."

"Yes, William."

"I will supervise the house in your absence, my lady, and see that Prue does not neglect the children."

"I have every confidence in you, William."

"My intention is to announce to the household this morning that your ladyship is indisposed-a trifle feverish, and that for fear of infection you would prefer that the children did not come to your room, or the maid-servants, and that you have bidden me wait upon you myself."

"Excellent, William. And your face, so solemn, will be exactly right for the occasion. You are, if I may say so, a born deceiver."

"Women have occasionally informed me so, my lady."

"I believe you to be heartless, William, after all. Are you sure I can trust you all alone amongst a pack of scatterbrained females?"

"I will be a father to them, my lady."

"You may reprimand Prue if you wish, she is inclined to be idle."

"I will do so."

"And frown upon Miss Henrietta if she talks too much."

"Yes, my lady."

"And should Master James very much desire a second helping of strawberries-"

"I am to give them to him, my lady."

"Yes, William. But not when Prue is looking… afterwards, in the pantry, by yourself."

"I understand the situation perfectly, my lady."

"Now I must go. Do you not wish you were coming with me?"

"Unfortunately, my lady, I possess an interior that does not take kindly to the motion of a ship upon the water. Your ladyship follows my meaning?"

"In other words, William, you are horridly sick."

"Your ladyship has a happy turn of phrase. In fact, since we are discussing the matter I am taking the liberty to suggest, my lady, that you should take with you this little box of pills, which I have found invaluable in the past, and which may be of help to you should some unhappy sensation come upon you,"

"How very kind of you, William. Give them to me, and I will put them in my bundle. I have a wager with your master that I shall not succumb. Do you think I shall win?"

"It depends upon what your ladyship is alluding to."

"That I shall not succumb to the motion of the ship, of course. What did you think I meant?"

"Forgive me, my lady. My mind, for the moment, had strayed to other things. Yes, I think you will win that wager."

"It is the only wager we have, William."

"Indeed, my lady."

"You sound doubtful."

"When two people make a voyage, my lady, and one of them a man like my master, and the other a woman like my mistress, the situation strikes me as being pregnant with possibilities."

"William, you are very presumptuous."

"I am sorry, my lady."

"And-French in your ideas."

"You must blame my mother, my lady."

"You are forgetting that I have been married to Sir Harry for six years, and am the mother of two children, and that next month I shall be thirty."

"On the contrary, my lady, it was these three things that I was most remembering."

"Then I am inexpressibly shocked at you. Open the door at once, and let me into the garden."

"Yes, my lady."

He pulled back the shutters, and drew aside the long heavy curtains. Something fluttered against the window, seeking an outlet, and as William flung open the door a butterfly, that had become imprisoned in the folds of the curtains, winged its way into the air.

"Another fugitive seeking escape, my lady."

"Yes, William. She smiled at him an instant, and standing upon the threshold sniffed the cool morning air, and looking up saw the first pale streak of the day creep into the sky. "Good-bye, William."

"Au revoir, my lady."

She went across the grass, clutching her bundle, her shawl over her head, and looking back once saw the grey outline of the house, solid, and safe, and sleeping, with William standing sentinel by the window. Waving her hand to him in farewell she followed Pierre Blanc, with his merry eyes and his dark monkey face and his ear-rings, down through the woods to the pirate ship in the creek.

Somehow she had expected bustle and noise, the confusion of departure, but when they came alongside La Mouette there was the usual silence. It was only when she had climbed the ladder to the deck and looked about her that she realised that the ship was ready for sea, the decks were clear, the men were standing at their appointed places.

One of the men came forward and bowed, bending his head low.

"Monsieur wishes you to go to the quarter-deck."

She climbed the ladder to the high poop-deck, and as she did so she heard the rattle of the chain in the hawser, the grind of the capstan, and the stamping of feet. Pierre Blanc, the song-maker, began his chant, and the voices of the men, low and soft, rose in the air, so that she turned, leaning over the rail to watch them. Their steady treading upon the deck, the creak of the capstan, and the monotony of their chant made a kind of poetry in the air, a lovely thing of rhythm, all seeming part of the fresh morning and part of the adventure.

Suddenly she heard an order called out behind her, clear and decisive, and for the first time she saw the Frenchman, standing beside the helmsman at the wheel, his face tense and alert, his hands behind his back. This was a different being from the companion of the river who had sat beside her in the little boat and mended her line, and later built a wood fire on the quay and cooked the fish, his sleeves rolled above his elbows, his hair falling into his eyes.

She felt an intruder, a silly woman amongst a lot of men who had work to do, and without a word she went and stood at a distance, against the rail, where she could not bother him, and he continued with his orders, glancing aloft, at the sky, at the water, at the banks of the river.

Slowly the ship gathered way, and the wind of the morning, coming across the hills, filled the great sails. She crept down the creek like a ghost upon the still water, now and again almost brushing the trees where the channel ran inshore, and all the while he stood beside the helmsman, giving the course, watching the curving banks of the creek. The wide parent river opened up before them, and now the wind came full and true from the west, sending a ripple on the surface, and as La Mouette met the strength of it she heeled slightly, her decks aslant, and a little whipping spray came over the bulwark. The dawn was breaking in the east, and the sky had a dull haze about it and a glow that promised fine weather. There was a salty tang in the air, a freshness that came from the open sea beyond the estuary, and as the ship entered the main channel of the river the sea-gulls rose in the air and followed them.

The men had ceased their chanting, and now stood, looking towards the sea, an air of expectancy about them, as though they were men who had idled and lazed too long and were suddenly thirsty, suddenly aflame. Once again the spray rose from the top of a high-crested sea, as the ship crossed the bar at the mouth of the estuary, and Dona, smiling, tasted it on her lips, and looking up, saw that the Frenchman had left the helmsman and was standing beside her, and the spray must have caught him too, for there was salt upon his lips and his hair was wet.

"Do you like it?" he said, and she nodded, laughing up at him, so that he smiled an instant, looking towards the sea. As he did so she was filled with a great triumph and a sudden ecstasy, for she knew then that he was hers, and she loved him, and that it was something she had known from the very beginning, from the first moment when she had walked into his cabin and found him sitting at the table drawing the heron. Or before that even, when she had seen the ship on the horizon stealing in towards the land, she had known then that this thing was to happen, that nothing could prevent it; she was part of his body and part of his mind, they belonged to each other, both wanderers, both fugitives, cast in the same mould.