Chapter Three

When Harry awoke, there was a pale light in the cabin. It was a light he recognized, reflected from the sand and shingle around the boat, which told him that the tide was out. Apart from the channels of the river itself, the estuary was dry. He lay on his back and watched as the shadows retreated to their corners of the ceil­ing, where they would be trapped in the cobwebs until the fire was lit again. He sat up and rubbed his eyes, groping for his glasses on the floor beside the bed.

Lizzie wasn’t there, although the place beside him was still warm and her bag was on a chair at the foot of the bed. Harry got up, still wearing the clothes he’d been wearing the night before, put on his shoes and climbed to the deck.

At first he couldn’t see her. It was six o’clock on a grey, October morning. Shivering, he scanned the foreshore with his binoculars, across the sands to the creek where the river ran into the sea, to the tough grass of the dunes on the further side of the estuary. This time, for once, he ignored the gathering birds: he was worried that Lizzie was missing, so far from her home, so far from her studies, in such a remote, unfamiliar place. He wished, for a second, that he hadn’t invited her with him: not for himself, but for her. With a shudder of anxiety, he realised that, as her older brother, thirteen years her senior and her only relation in all the world now that their parents were gone, he was responsible for her. Perhaps, instead of bringing her to Wales, he should have accompanied her to London and resettled her there, where she might purge her grief by immersing herself in her music.

But then there was a cry from the estuary. He saw Lizzie, a hundred yards from the boat, coming towards him on the fore­shore. Her coppery hair was the brightest thing in the mono­chrome morning. She was waving to him and calling. He looked at her through the binoculars: she was smiling too. She approached slowly, for she was walking on the very edge of the foreshore, on the uneven footing of boulders and seaweed, through the flotsam and jetsam of timbers and bottles and bones and bundled grasses. Every now and then, balancing precariously on the slippery rocks, she squatted and turned over the tangles of wrack, examined a relic and discarded it, before straightening up and continuing towards the boat. Harry watched her, cursing the poor condition of the binoculars. He put them down and waited for her to arrive at the mooring.

Her footsteps rang on the rusted rungs of the ladder as she climbed from the shore to the top of the sea wall. Breathing hard, she crossed the deck to where Harry was sitting. He didn’t turn to look at her when she paused behind him; she said nothing, because she was out of breath, but he felt her hand on his head. Her fingers, smelling of seaweed, cold and wet from the beach and the cold, wet ladder, ran over his ear and down his cheek to his mouth, where they traced the line of his lips.

‘Look what I found, Harry, among all the other wonderful things on your wonderful beach!’ she whispered, leaning her head close to his. ‘What on earth is it? Is it a sea spider? Is there such a thing? Or only in the weird and wonderful world of Harry Clewe? Look, Harry! What is it?’

They took the brittlestar into the cabin and placed it in a shallow tray of water, with a bed of sand. Lizzie lit the fire. Straight away, that first morning, she began to make the Ozymandias more like home.