A LIGHT, MISTY RAIN LINGERED AFTER THE GALE AND SEEMED TO engulf St. George Town, glistening the homes and alleys, the carts and branches and cobblestones. Elinore Somers had awakened early to walk the beach, as was her custom, and hurriedly threw on her cloak against the wet morning.
The beach was her particular obsession and had been since she was a young girl dreaming daily of leaving Bermuda for—where? Anywhere, in truth. She’d envied boys, and Nicholas Fallon in particular, when they’d left to go to sea. She’d felt trapped; her mother was dead and she’d hated her father for nothing more than being her only parent.
The leaden sky was heavy on the sea, and even the shore birds were absent this morning, the day apparently being too somber even for them. Elinore bent her head against the wind, occasionally stopping to search the horizon for any sign of a ship. The ferocity of the gale had frightened her, and she didn’t frighten easily. She knew rationally that Rascal would be coming from the south, yet fear was often irrational, especially when it was for someone you loved. Fallon was an excellent seaman, and Beauty was always concerned for the safety of the crew, but anything could happen at sea. And, as Fallon often said, much of it was bad.
Elinore was tall and lithe, with blonde hair and pale blue eyes that missed nothing. Today those eyes searched the distant sky for small, white patches of canvas. She had fallen in love with Fallon years before, had “set her cap” for him as the islanders would say; well, she knew what she wanted in a man. She closed her eyes for a moment and thought ahead to the not-too-distant future when they would be married in a small chapel by the sea, just as Fallon had promised her when he’d proposed marriage.
When she opened her eyes, she saw a small figure running towards her on the beach. In the distance, she thought it a foreshortened man, but it became a boy running at full tilt. It was Little Eddy, as he was known on the island, a clever boy always on the edge of mischief. Little Eddy was a beach forager, for Bermuda lay over 600 miles from the nearest land and all manner of items continually washed ashore. The coral surrounding the island, particularly the northern approaches, was a virtual graveyard for inattentive sailors. Their ships’ cargoes were regularly salvaged by Bermudians. Little Eddy was a born salvager.
He had no father, and his mother had little time for him or, in truth, little affection. The boy’s dream, like Elinore’s dream had been, was to leave Bermuda and see the world. Perhaps, he reasoned, if he gathered and sold enough flotsam and ships’ debris he could fund passage on a ship. At least he had a plan, which Elinore had to admit was more than she’d ever had.
“Miss Somers! Miss Somers!” said the breathless boy. “There’s been a shipwreck at North Rock! You can see wood planks on the coral and there’s clothes and things. It was that gale that did for her!”
Elinore’s heart stopped for a beat, her mind going to Fallon’s clothes, what he wore to sea, fearing the sight of a shirt upon the rocks that she knew.
“Little Eddy, please show me,” she said as she took him by the arm. “Show me where.”
When at last they reached the water’s edge at North Rock the coral told its tale. Planks were indeed strewn about the shoreline and bits of ship were hung up in the coral heads: a chest, some pots and pans, clothing and empty tins, the remnants of a thing that lived and sailed. There were no bodies, for they would have been carried out to sea; hunting for survivors was out of the question.
Little Eddy hopped along the coral tops, picking up what he could, and hopping back to shore before a wave overtook him. He had an armful of salvage and a grim expression on his face.
“Here’s part of the name board,” he said to Elinore solemnly. He held up a piece of wooden plank with a single letter painted upon it.
Elinore held her breath, then breathed out slowly, for the ship that went down on the coral at North Rock could not have been Rascal.
Little Eddy held the letter “J” in his hands.