May 1901
20 miles northwest of Skúmaskot, Iceland
Clouds.
A blue sky.
The sound of someone vomiting.
She came to on her back by the try-pot, which had somehow been flung back onto the deck, though now upside down. Next to her was the body of a dead lamb, and one of the men. Collins, she recalled, from his black neckerchief. Daverley approached with Captain Willingham, their faces drawn as they lowered to inspect Collins. His head was turned and his eyes stared ahead, fixed on her, his right arm reaching out.
“Where’s Ellis?” Daverley asked Reid, who shivered next to him, soaked to the bone but otherwise spared. He shook his head, and the captain grimaced. Two men gone. And the storm wasn’t finished with them.
“You best get downstairs to your cabin,” Daverley told her. He pointed grimly to a dark line on the horizon. “There are more of those waves coming, bigger than before. Go to your cabin and lock the door.”
He said it with enough urgency to persuade her to obey. She nodded, then made her way quickly down the stairs to the deck, which sat in three inches of water. A brown hen floated past, seemingly content to brood on the water, and in a corner a cow ate from a burst bag of oats. Outside the captain’s room was a row of sandbags, preventing water from entering. If the maps got wet, they were done for.
She went into her room and made to shut the door, but just then a hand slapped on the wood, stopping it. Lovejoy stood there, that horrible, grimacing grin on his face, close enough for her to see the black holes in his teeth.
“What are you doing?” she said. Then, braver: “Why aren’t you up on the deck helping with everyone else?”
“Ellis is dead,” he said, looking her up and down. “You must be happy.”
The pills made her reactions slow and sluggish, so as he reached out to touch her cheek, she found she could do no more than freeze to the spot, her eyes on his.
“My selkie wife,” he said, stretching a smile across his black teeth.
The first night, he stayed with her a while, after. The length of him on the small bed, insisting that she lie with her arm across his round chest, his filthy hand gripping hers. She felt drenched in shame. In guilt. In disgust. She felt like the most integral part of her had been scooped out. She felt like she wanted to fold inward, in, in, never to return. She was in two places at once. On that hideous bed and elsewhere, floating, screaming, both at the same time.
Lovejoy talked as though nothing had happened, as though they had always been confidants, and not strangers, she held hostage to his dark desires. He told her about his childhood. About his sons, Ben, Arthur, and Philip. Scoundrels, he said, picking his teeth. In and out of prison, one of them locked up now for good. Murder. Another child in the highlands from a relationship in his youth. His own years in prison, and the beatings he meted there.
She began to hum. It was half intentional, a bidding of her body to close out the very fact of him, his gravelly voice, the rasp and wheeze of his chest under her ear. The stubborn thud of his heartbeat.
“What’s that you’re singing, selkie?” he asked.
She didn’t answer, not verbally. Hymns she had sung in church and school, lullabies her mother had sung to her as a child . . . they spilled out from her now, soft, wordless. An involuntary response to what had happened. To what he had done.
He grew angry when she didn’t respond, tightening his grip on her arm and making threats, then pushing her off him and storming angrily out of the cabin.
In the darkness, she curled the bedclothes around her aching body. The melodies continued in her head, seeping from her memories, until sleep rescued her with its wild and dreamless silence.