The Fisherman did as the Lady asked and unhooked her dress, and he said to her, ‘Lady, if you do not mean to lie with me, you must tell me this instant, for the sight of your beauty is too much to bear.’ And the Lady replied, ‘Then my beauty is yours, as poor as it is, for by your dear love you have purchased mine, and yours it shall remain unto eternity.’ So the Fisherman took her to bed and loved her mightily, and in the morning they went to the village and were married, and the Fisherman and the Lady gave thanks to God for their happiness.
But that night, while the Lady lay asleep in the deep thrall of nuptial pleasure, the Fisherman stole from their couch and hid her strange suit in the false bottom of an old chest, for he took no chance that his bride should disappear back into the sea that had brought her to him . . .
THE BOOK OF TIME, A. M. HAYWOOD (1921)
I smelled the smoke first. Though I couldn’t realize it then, a long time would pass before the scent of a peat fire did not constitute some part of my awareness.
I cannot say whether I was conscious yet. My head was heavy and dark, and I could not move my limbs. I remember thinking I was dreaming, that I was caught in some dream from which I could not wake, and that my surroundings, my person, my own name were a mystery. I realized I was cold, but that even the relief of shivering was beyond my power.
I stirred slightly, trying to lift my head, but some warm, constraining force held me in place. In the instant before I slipped back into the void, I understood that this force was an animate one: the arms of a human being.
And I heard a voice, hushing me gently. Telling me to rest a while longer.
• • •
The next time I woke, the break was sharp. I jolted upward, and now the unknown human arms released me. Though I was still weak, I could turn—indeed, you could not have stopped me from turning—and saw a bearded face before me.
Its lips moved. “Feeling better?”
I kissed him. That was our first kiss: an act of reflex. Because he was Silverton, who never refused a kiss in his life, he embraced me back. I wish I could recall how it felt, how long it lasted, whether our lips parted, how he tasted, but the memory is too confused. I only remember how glad I was, how relieved, though I could not quite determine why I should be so glad and so relieved. And the scratch of his beard on my skin, that is indelible. I can feel it still.
At length our mouths parted, and he set me against his chest. I believe he was laughing, or at least chuckling. My head moved in rhythm, and the vibration filled me. “Don’t try to move anymore, my dear,” he said, and his voice sounded different somehow, not in timbre but in accent. “You’re quite safe, at least for now.”
“Safe?” I whispered.
“In my little hut. Nobody bothers me here.”
I had so many questions, but no strength or wit or sense to put them into thoughts. Only the single word: “Where?”
“Where? Oh, my darling girl,” he said, laughing again, though it was not a joyful laugh. “I’m afraid that’s the wrong question.”
• • •
I suppose it was several hours later before we talked again. He left me to heat some broth in the iron pot on the hearth, and as I lay back upon the pallet and watched him, I realized I was covered by several lengths of fur. The room was not large, perhaps twelve feet by twelve, containing only a pair of chairs and a small table, a large chest, the primitive fireplace, the pallet on which I lay. A rough, earthen substance formed the walls around us. On the wall to my right, a window seemed to have been cut, but it was covered by a cloth of some kind.
What lay beyond, I was terrified to discover.
My little hut, he had said. He crouched before me now, his tall frame cramped by the small room, his limbs even leaner than before. Instead of his usual impeccable suit, he wore a tunic of homespun wool, belted in leather, and dark hose of the kind an actor might wear, and I thought, for the first time, shivering not with cold but with fear—
My God, my God. What have we wrought?
Silverton seemed not to notice my awakening. When he returned, he bore the broth in a cup made of pewter, and he spooned it to my lips himself, as if I were an infant. He was not without reason. I had no more strength than an infant, and I continued to shiver, despite the fur. He remained patient and told me the coldness would ease soon. That was why he had kept me close, these past hours, piled with fur, the peat fire blazing extravagantly, though it was August.
“Still August?” I said, rather hoarsely. “Then how have you grown such a beard?”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s only been a few days since—since—since I saw you last.”
He set the spoon in the cup and stared at me. “Truelove. My dear, dear Truelove. I’ve been wandering these blasted lands for three years now. Are you not aware?”
“Three years!” I started a little, and realized, as I did so, that I wore only my chemise beneath the fur. Neither dress nor stays nor petticoats belonged to me. I hardly cared, however. My attention was fixed on the face before me, its lower half covered by stiff golden whiskers, a shade or two darker than the hair on his head, which was quite long and bound in a queue at the back of his neck. The truth of his words now stunned me.
“Yes,” he said, more gently. He set down the cup on the stone floor beside him. “Are you saying you’ve passed only a few days, in that time?”
I nodded.
“Well, I’m dashed. I suppose I must look a beast to you.” He ran a hand through his hair, loosening it, and then smoothed his beard. “By God, it’s good to speak English, however. You’re confused, of course.”
“Oh, how can you be so cheerful?” I said, and burst into tears.
For a moment, he only stared at me in astonishment. Well he might. I have never been the sort of woman to weep; I have learned, over the course of a life spent chiefly in the company of men, that tears must be kept strictly on the inside. I don’t know what broke me then. The idea, perhaps, that Silverton had lived three long years alone in this place, while I had lived only three days. In my state of physical and mental enervation, I couldn’t bear it.
At length he conquered his amazement and reached for me. I sobbed against his homespun shoulder and found that while the odor of his expensive soap had disappeared, the familiar scent of his skin had not. Silverton. His voice came like a miracle into my ears.
“Because I’m used to it, my dear. That’s how I can be cheerful. And I’m so damned glad to see you again, I might sing.” His hand stroked my hair. “I never imagined I should have this chance again.”
“No faith at all?”
“Faith? Faith in what? Luck? Though I suppose my luck is your misfortune. How the devil did it happen to you? I still can’t quite work out how I ended up in this mess. One moment I was chasing a villain into the street, and the next—hmm. Something to do with Max, of course, the damned beast. Perhaps you can enlighten me?”
We had never touched so intimately—I in such shocking undress, he clothed scarcely more decently—and yet I felt no embarrassment. No constraint, no sense of doing wrong. The strict code in which I had been bred seemed to have lifted from my shoulders and flown away. I lifted my head and met his soft, curious gaze, and I told him the truth.
“I came back to find you, of course. I made Max do it. It seems he has the power, you see, not just to summon but to send, almost at will.”
“I see.”
“At first, we tried to bring you back, but we couldn’t find where, or how. So there was no other way. I had him send me to find you.”
The room was quiet. Through a crack in the curtain covering the window, I perceived that it was daylight, but what hour? Morning or afternoon or evening, I couldn’t say. With my eyes, I traced the fine new lines etched upon Silverton’s face, the expression of grim wonderment. His lips were cracked and full, his beard glinting faintly in the glow from the hearth.
“My dear, brave Truelove,” he said. “As game as they come. And now we’re both in the soup.”
I seized his sleeve. “No, we’re not. How can you possibly think me so heedless? We made a plan, the duke and I—”
A series of loud, rapid thumps shook the wood of the door. Silverton swore.
“Who is it?” I exclaimed, in a whisper.
He sighed and detached himself from me. “It’s your welcome committee, of course. I’m afraid I was expecting this. Tuck yourself back under those blankets, my dear, and attempt to look as if you’re sleeping off a night of carnal debauchment.”
“What?”
Silverton kissed my forehead and rose to his feet, and so small were the hut’s dimensions that his dear, golden head bent at the neck, in order to avoid brushing the ceiling. He said, with a note of apology, “I’m afraid I told them you were my concubine.”
• • •
I obeyed him instantly, at least in the first directive. Whether I actually contrived to look like a prostitute—that tip of my head showing from the edge of the furs, that is—I know not, for I kept my eyes shut tight, and the voices I heard, masculine and rough, almost guttural, spoke no language I recognized.
Silverton answered them in the same tongue, however, and at one point the sound of laughter drifted from the doorway. My cheeks turned hot, chasing away the last of the chill.
Then footsteps, heavy ones, and a sharp word from Silverton.
I lay perfectly still. I believe the side of my face showed above the covering, but that was all. A rank smell found my nostrils, and a wave of disgust and terror passed through my belly. How close was he? I couldn’t tell. I didn’t dare open my eyes. Silverton was saying something, and somebody answered him, and there was another round of male laughter, of the kind I recognized from my own age. Certain things were eternal, it seemed. I began to perspire, in my cocoon of animal hides, and just as I thought I couldn’t bear the tension, the loathing, for another instant, something took hold of the furs and yanked them away from my body.
I gasped and sat up, and Silverton let out the kind of roar I had never before heard from his throat. Before I could even comprehend the appearance of the man who stood next to the pallet—closer, far closer than I had imagined—Silverton was between us. I snatched up the furs. From the doorway, men laughed. Silverton had whipped out a blade of some kind, a knife or a dagger, and held it now against the other man’s throat. I saw black hose and thick leather gaiters and a tunic much like Silverton’s, and also a sword, raised slightly, which I now realized was the object that had pulled back my covering. The metal glinted in the light from the open door. I remember thinking how battered it looked, how scarred. Silverton was speaking, or rather he snarled words I could not understand. From the doorway, the other men roared happily.
Then a curious silence fell upon the small, smoky room. The two men stood a few feet away from me, Silverton and the intruder, poised against each other. From my perspective on the pallet, I could see nothing of their expressions, but I knew better than to intercede, or even to move. Or perhaps I was too stunned to do either. Some strange, primitive drama was unfolding before me, some ritual. Silverton’s back moved as he breathed, and I found myself counting the long, slow beats of his respiration. The fresh air moved inside the hut, summer-mild, laced with the familiar scent of the sea. The sword moved slightly; Silverton hissed some quick word, and the other man drew back, laughing. Silverton laughed, too, but I knew him too well. I knew he didn’t mean it.
All at once, the tension dissolved. The man tucked his sword into his belt, and as he moved to the door, I caught a glimpse of his face, his dark beard and his pale face, and the scar that creased the skin above his left eyebrow. I remember thinking it was not a face you could easily forget.
• • •
When the door closed at last, I rose to my feet.
“Have you any clothes for me?” I asked.
He faced away from me, one hand still braced against the door, his head bent as if in prayer. “Not as such,” he replied, rather dryly.
“I suppose I might borrow one of your tunics, then.”
“Why?”
“I must—there are certain—I require a moment of privacy.”
Silverton straightened and turned. His face began to crinkle. The laughter built slowly, as that of a man not quite sane, and proceeded into helpless whoops. “Oh, Truelove,” he said, wiping his eyes. “My dear Truelove. You are so damned—so damned—my God. You’re just the same. Perfectly, beautifully unchanged, the truest Truelove there ever was. God forever bless you.”
“Sir—”
“Sir.” He sagged back against the door. “A band of ruffians turns up at your door. The breadth of a mere hair stands between you and a most brutal rape. And you—”
“Rape!”
“Yes, Truelove. Did you not divine their purpose?”
I shook my head. My throat had closed in shock, making words impossible.
“Dear chaps. They’d decided I’d had time enough with you, you see. Fair’s fair. They wanted their turns.”
He said it lightly, but his face was grim and exhausted. I thought, for some reason, of our earlier kiss, and how heartfelt it was, and how curiously innocent. How tenderly our lips had moved each other. How I had then rested myself against his chest and thought myself safe, as safe as I had ever felt in my life.
I made myself speak. “What did you tell them?”
“That you were mine.”
I must have frowned, because he pushed himself away from the door and said, “I realize that sort of thing goes against your noble principles, of course, but I felt I had no other choice. Possession is the creed here. Possession, enforced by strength.”
“I see.”
“No. I don’t believe you do. You are to go nowhere without me, is that clear? Not one step outside this hut.”
“This is nonsense.”
“I’m afraid not. It’s deadly serious. You’ve got no idea—” He shook his head and moved to pick up the cup and the spoon that sat next to the pallet. “It’s damned lucky I came upon you first. I don’t know what sort of all-powerful Providence was keeping watch over you, Truelove, but you should offer up your orisons forthwith. Still hungry?”
I shook my head.
He set the utensils on the table and went to the wooden chest under the window. “In the meantime, if you’ll be so good as to pop this tunic over your fair form and follow me, we shall proceed to the privy.”
“We?”
“You still stand, I presume, in need of relief?”
“Yes, but—”
“Come along, then.” He handed me the tunic and winked. “I won’t watch, I promise.”
• • •
Outside, it was drizzling, and my need was urgent. I wasted little time inspecting my surroundings, which were gray and shrouded, but hurried the few yards to the tiny shed that served us, while Silverton’s hand gripped mine. He stood outside, stalwart, until I emerged, and invited me to rinse my hands afterward in the bucket beneath the eaves, which caught the rain from a wooden spout. Some small distance away, I heard the soft crash of the sea against the rocks, but I could see nothing through the mist.
The expedition exhausted me. Inside, I sank back on the pallet while Silverton heated more broth. All this we did in silence, and when we had both drunk our fill, he sat comfortably next to me on the pallet, a few inches away, as if we were housemates of long standing. I had neither strength nor will to banish him. I asked him what time it was.
“Time?” he said. “No such thing, my dear. Not of the clock, in any case.”
“Is it morning or evening, then?”
“Coming on to evening. I’ll cut a bit of bread and cheese for supper. Ale to wash it down. Humble rations, I’m afraid. Nothing like the champagne and whatnot we enjoyed during our last evening together. I hope it agrees with you. If not, I suppose I can—”
He was nervous. I inched closer and laid my head on his shoulder. “Don’t trouble yourself. I’m not hungry.”
“You’ll need your strength, believe me. You won’t feel properly yourself for a week at least, and even then . . .” The sentence faded ominously.
“It doesn’t matter. We’re going home tomorrow.”
“Home?”
“Yes, home. Max is waiting for us, he’s ready. I’ll show you where.” I yawned. “It’s all arranged.”
“Ah. Of course it’s all arranged. Each detail absolutely fail-proof. I would expect no less of you.”
His arm was around my shoulders. We leaned back against the wall and stared at the dull orange glow of the fire. Silverton had removed his leather shoes, but his stockings remained, loose and woolen, bound by leather gaiters. I found myself wondering what his feet looked like.
“And here I am, before the fire, Emmeline Truelove tucked under my arm,” he said softly. “Who would have thought it possible? By God, I would have traded my soul for this, two days ago.”
“I imagine any woman would have sufficed.”
“Perhaps for the purpose of an evening’s cuddle,” he said, “but I shouldn’t trade my soul for her. Tattered and unworthy an object though it is.”
“Well, here I am, and your soul remains your own. No cost to you whatsoever.”
“Except three years of my life, of course, but that hardly signifies.”
“Three years. Have you really been here three years?”
“It passes belief, doesn’t it? There are times I felt as if I’d lived here forever. As if I’d been born again into a new world. Three years.” He shook his head. “Three lifetimes. You can’t imagine.”
“Tell me. Tell me everything you’ve done.”
He laughed. “I’d be rattling on for weeks if I did.”
“Tell me something, then. What happened when you first arrived?”
“Well, I woke up much as you did, inside the hut of some kindly bystander, except—I imagine—a great deal more confused. For some time, I thought I had died altogether, and this was purgatory. Eventually I pieced together what had happened. The essentials, I mean. That I had passed through some portal of time in the manner of our good friend Tadeas on Skyros, and that Max must somehow be behind it all. The why of it remains a mystery, however. Perhaps you can enlighten me, when you’re up to it.”
“Not now.” I yawned. “When we’re home again. With Max. We’ll talk about it then.”
“Oh, I shall demand a proper reckoning from Max, I assure you.”
I wanted to say more, to tell him that Max had little more notion than I did how all this had come to pass, but fatigue made my tongue and my wits too slow. Instead, I asked him how he had survived.
“Training, I suppose,” he said simply. “You’ll recall I’ve spent the last decade of my life dropping into various corners of the globe, living by my wits and my good right arm. And I have a certain aptitude for language, God knows how. Once I picked up the lingua franca, I began to get along well enough.”
“Thank God for that.”
“Mind you, it was a lonely existence. Not a friend, not a soul to whom I could unburden myself. The odd moment of black despair.”
He spoke in perfect tranquility. I slid my hand beneath the blankets and laid it upon his chest.
“But surely you must have met somebody sympathetic. Some friend you might trust.”
“The first rule of survival, Truelove, is that you trust nobody. I haven’t sat like this with another human being since—well, since our last dinner in Edinburgh. And I would have bartered anything for a kiss such as the one you gave me this morning.”
So great was my surprise, I found the strength to lift my head. “Are you telling me—why, you cannot have been chaste all this time.”
“I have.”
“But you—you’re Silverton! And there are women—there must be women—”
“Of course there are women, Truelove. But I am not the same man. I hardly even remember him. Life, you see, has shrunk to its essentials. During the day, I occupy myself with remaining in one piece. During the night, I sleep. When I long for a woman, when I long for a companion of an evening, when I long for anything at all, Truelove . . .”
His gaze was steady, looking not at me but at the fire. So blue were his eyes, I could still discern their color, even in this faded light, although the fire turned the shade closer to green. I lifted my hand and touched his beard, and I remembered how he used to shave twice a day, and that his cheeks were once smooth and bare. The arm, the shoulder that supported me, was hard with muscle and bone. There was not a spare ounce to him, not a breath of softness. And he was Silverton. The same man I had known a moment ago, except he had changed form, changed voice, changed dress, changed everything.
I waited for him to finish his sentence, but he did not.
“There was a more practical reason, too,” he said. “Because there were times when I had no hope, I’ll admit. No hope of you or anything else, these past three years. But in these unenlightened times, I had no means of preventing the consequences of union.”
“Has it ever stopped you before?”
“Why, Truelove. What an awful beast you think me. Of course it has. I don’t get women with child, my dear. My father laid down a thunderous lecture on the matter when I came of age, and I never forgot it.”
“I am—I am astonished,” I whispered.
“You wound me. Well, there it is.” He paused. “A good man, my father. A good man, a faithful husband. I always hoped . . .”
“Hoped what?”
“Nothing.” He kissed the top of my head. “Go back to sleep. In the morning, God willing, we shall see what fate has planned for us.”
• • •
In the middle of the night, I woke suddenly, as if someone had prodded me. Except for the remains of the fire in the hearth, glowing like a soft beacon on the opposite wall, the room was utterly dark, and for an instant I lay in terror, thinking myself alone in a void.
A noise came to me, the rush of a man’s heavy breath, not far away.
Silverton, I thought, and I remembered the thought that had woken me. The question I had not asked, and the answer he had not offered.
My earlier mood of drowsy languor was gone, replaced by a fine-tuned alertness. I listened to my companion for a minute or two, the steady sounds of his slumber, until I could just pick out his shape on the floor nearby, wrapped in a blanket like some sort of long, gold-tipped sausage. A strangely virtuous sausage. I remembered the gentle way he had removed me from his embrace, just as my eyes began to close, and how he had murmured something to me as he tucked the blankets around me, though I could not recall the words. In my unguarded mood, I had wanted him to stay, and I think I may have told him so.
Evidently he had found the strength to resist me.
Outside my little cocoon, the air was not cold, only close and damp. The air smelled of old, stale smoke and human flesh. My mind teemed. I thought about the territory outside these walls, hidden by mist; the same island I had left a day ago, the same rocks and earth and water, and yet belonging to a different people, a foreign world. The enormity was beyond my comprehension. And yet Silverton slept nearby. He was proof. He was indisputable. I could not be dreaming him; his shoulder had been too firm, his words too clear. And now, his sleeping form, too solid.
I lifted the furs slowly from my body. I still wore Silverton’s borrowed tunic, covering my chemise and my skin, though it reached only just past my knees, like a child’s nightshirt. I slid from the pallet without a sound, not the slightest rustle of linen and straw, and for a moment I crouched there in the darkness, trying to detect any change in the rhythm of Silverton’s breath, trying to orient myself to the room around me. The dim orange glow of the fire’s end, straight ahead. The window, then, lay to my right.
Below the window, Silverton’s wooden chest.
The floor was made of stone and beaten earth, covered by rushes. With each step, they made a slight noise, like a whisper. I kept my gaze on the fire, because that was the only thing I could see in this thick, wild darkness; my right hand I stretched out in front of me, searching for the wall and the window.
As I said, the hut was not large. Three, four, five steps—five soft whispers of my feet on the rush-covered floor—and my fingertips brushed the rough surface of the wall. I felt along until I discovered the corner of the window, and then I bent to place my palms on the lid of the chest below.
How smooth it was, almost slippery. In the absence of light, I couldn’t tell whether this was the same chest that had made its way to our modern age, only that they were about the same size, and also the same simple shape, rectangular, unadorned. The lid curved slightly, like the side of a barrel. I slid my hands down the sides to the corners and lifted it open.
Last spring, when Silverton and I embarked suddenly together on a voyage to the Mediterranean Sea—upon a vessel no less august than the Duke of Olympia’s private yacht—he had traveled with no fewer than a dozen handsome steamer trunks, the exquisite, well-tailored contents of which were tended by an exacting—if rather fearsome—valet. Now, it seemed, his entire wardrobe existed within this small wooden box. My searching hands found a few layers of rough wool, folded neatly, and a coil of leather. More folded wool, narrower and thinner in texture, which I imagined must be hose. A large, shapeless garment, possibly a cloak. Something else made of leather. Underneath these few items of clothing, I found the bottom of the chest, and I was just trying to judge whether its location hinted at a cavity hidden underneath when a hand came to rest on my shoulder.
“Just what the devil do you think you’re doing?” asked his lordship.
• • •
My father and I hardly ever spoke of my mother, who died when I was not yet six, but I know she was given to deceit. Once, I asked her about my real father, the man who sired me, and she told me he was a great prince, handsome and rich and charming; she used to spin other tales when she settled me in bed at night. I don’t remember them all, but I can still hear the persuasive lilt of her voice as she built me castles, stone by stone, and whispered promises she had no means of keeping.
All mothers say these things, I am told, and I suppose she meant to comfort me. But as time went on, and I learned the truth of her past, of my own conception, I resented her falsehoods bitterly. Better to tell me the truth, that I was begotten of a brief, lustful encounter with some carnal-minded gentleman; a transaction, no more, a commercial exchange. I sometimes wondered how much he had paid for the privilege of starting me in her womb, and whether he ever knew the result of his few minutes’ recreation.
A short time before she died, when her belly was just beginning to round out with a true, honest babe, conceived in matrimony with Mr. Truelove, she told me the greatest lie of all. She took my small, frightened hand and told me that she would be well again soon, should shortly rise from her sickbed and join me for tea in the nursery, and she said this thing with such conviction—I can almost see the sincere slant to her beautiful eyebrows, even now, though I never can recall the shape or the color of her eyes themselves—that my fears dissolved at once. Only later did I realize how skillfully she had misled me, and I have hated a lie ever since, even those small, harmless ones in which most people trade daily.
You can imagine, therefore, the sickness in my heart when Silverton laid his hand on my shoulder, in the black, damp netherworld of his hut on the island of Hoy, my own palms deep inside the contents of his private chest, and asked me what the devil I was doing.
The lie came easily to my lips, as it had to my mother’s.
“I was cold. I thought you might have another tunic. A blanket, a cloak.”
He reached around me and closed the lid of the chest. “My dearest love. You should have woken me.”
“I have already troubled you enough.”
An instant’s silence settled upon us both. In this strange, primeval world, not a single noise disturbed the stillness, not the slightest sign that another human being existed on the earth. Not the sea, not the wind outside. Even my breath seemed to have stopped in my chest, and so did his. Only the warmth of Silverton’s flesh reached me through the darkness, spreading softly along my back and my arms. My hands dropped away from the chest.
“Come to bed, then, Truelove,” he said at last. “We’ll make you warm enough.”
He took my elbow, and I followed him obediently to the pallet and climbed under the furs. My heart smacked, my breath turned shallow at the thought of my deception. I nearly blurted out the truth, I nearly demanded the truth from him, and to this day I don’t know why I didn’t. Perhaps I was too frightened to hear the answer. Instead I lay on my back, staring up at that shadow that must have been his head, expecting his lips to find mine, his long limbs to slide down the furs and warm me with the compressed, violent heat of his own body.
But he only drew another length of fur over my body and tucked them all snug, the way a mother might do to an infant, hardly touching me at all. He asked me if that was warm enough, and I said it was.
“Good,” he said. “We’ll find our way home in the morning, never fear.”