King of the Sea

Chapter 24

Chapter 24

"Of course you should! That's what I'm telling you." She hung on her own words every bit as avidly as he, for she, too, had no idea what would come out next. "It's being honest, innit. That's what I'm being with you, too, though Gawd knows why. I mean, what have we got in common?"

"Not much. But it doesn't seem to matter, does it." She smiled wanly. It was true. "That couple's moved off," she said. "We could go and sit down if you want."

Glad to be moving again he resumed his grip on her elbow and walked with tiny skips at her side. "If you don't mind me leaping up every ten words. I feel so restless after getting all that off my chest. Oh, Emma! You've transformed the world for me!"

"All right!" She laughed at his impetuousness as she sat down.

He thought the way she pulled her skirts beneath her and gave her bustle a little chuck to one side was one of the divinest things ever. "I love you," he said, gazing down at her. "That's what I've been trying to say all day."

She felt an impulse to say she'd never have guessed it, but he was just a little too serious to make it kindly. She had an intimation of many future exchanges between them, exchanges in which his emotional strength would defeat her in just such petty ways. And so he would progress with her, from one insignificant victory to another until the power of his feelings had won what her feebler sentiments could not defend in other words, everything, for, when all was said and done, she saw little in herself that was worth defending.

"I wish I did," she said.

"What? Love me?" He sat beside her, preparing for an orgy of comfort - telling her she was not to worry, it would come, just give it a chance, he had enough to last them both ...

She cut across all that with her next words, a surprisingly bitter bark: "No me! I wish I could see one small bit of what you see in me, Lawrence."

"That's the first time you've called me that." She stared deep into his eyes, not taking him up on the point. "How honest can we be?" she asked herself aloud.

"Utterly, absolutely!" he assured her.

"I wonder."

"Try."

Catherine, who had raced up to the attic when her brother and Emma sat down, was disgusted to find that the thick bole of the plane tree obscured them from there, too. She was sure they were kissing behind its shelter, even though it obscured them only from the Dowtys' house and a few of its neighbours; that was why they'd been strolling around waiting for that particular bench to become vacant, of course, so that Aunt Daphne and Uncle Brian wouldn't spot them at it. Now she'd have to put on her boots and leggings and her coat and muffler and take George out for yet another little walk. "Grr!" she snarled.

The dog leaped up hopefully.

"How can they sit out there in this cold, Georgy Porgy?" she asked. "If that's what love does for you, I'm never going to fall for it!"

Aunt Daphne came in at that moment and from the supercilious smile on her face, Catherine just knew she knew everything. She'd probably been down in the drawing room, spying with her opera glasses. "Aren't you, dear?" she asked lightly. "If mere curiosity can drive you out into that same cold, just think what a monstrous horseshoe Cupid is even now into his boxing glove for you!" slipping "I thought he fired darts," Catherine complained.

The smile did not waver. "Most women suffer the same delusion, darling. It's all part of his cunning, you see. He's a pugilist, not an archer. Knocking us out is his game. I'll walk with you, if you like. I had no idea all this was going on. Isn't it exciting!" She took the girl's arm before she could think of refusing.

"I can't seem to love myself much," Emma was meanwhile saying. "When you go on about me like what you was doing, I can't think you mean me. It doesn't sound like me. I just stand there, thinking to myself, E's gone and got the wrong gel. This can't be me. That's all I think about it." She reached out a hand and touched his arm hesitantly. "D'you know what I mean? I'm a very common, ordinary gel, that's what. Nothing special."

He drew breath to protest his love again and then, catching the suspicion in her eye, reined himself back. "I know." He nodded uncomfortably, like a horse champing to be off. "I know it's stupid, really. It I mean, I do feel all those things for you, and I do think about you all the time, but you said be honest well, if - I'm honest, I must admit there's one small bit of common sense left in me that says it's all too much and I'll come down to earth with a bump one day and all the things that all the sensible people in the world always say to those who are head over heels in love."

She was about to respond to this when a further thought struck him. "Actually, common sense tells me even more than that. It tells me I'm not doing you any good by painting you all in gold and sepia "That's what I mean! Gawd, if only I could talk the ... words like what you can. It don't do me no favours if

"I mean, if I could be just a little less in love with you, then I might find there's an even more wonderful girl waiting to be discovered in you. I don't mean wonderful-wonderful but real-wonderful. The real Emma Harding. To be honest, I don't know you at all, so how can I be in love with you! But to be even more honest, I want to know you better than anyone else on earth - so that's how I can be in love with you. Because I want to know you like no man ever knew a woman before." He swallowed heavily. "Is that better?"

you...

Suddenly she could not stop the tears from flowing. She did not exactly cry. In fact, she felt curiously happy, happier than she could remember in a long while, as the water brimmed over her eyelids and the whole world shuddered to pieces behind an ocean of

hot salt. "See!" Catherine whispered excitedly to Aunt Daphne, hidden in the bushes some sixty paces away.

"I said they were kissing!" "Bread and cheese and kisses," Daphne murmured. "Bachelors' fare."

HE STORM BLEW itself out during that third week of March. Over the same period the tides approached their spring flood, at the height of which Captain Troy had decided to refloat Phoenix - or at least to try. The peak would occur on the twenty-second of the month, which was, coincident ally, the day on which Catherine and her Aunt Daphne snooped on the lovers in Highbury Fields.

By then, Frank and Teresa had been lovers, in a more profound sense of the word, for ten blissful days. During all that time Boris was the only other

person who knew she was still on board. The rest of the passengers had dispersed overland at once, either to Boston, their intended port of arrival, or directly to their final destinations, which ranged from California to Newfoundland. A skeleton crew remained against the day when Phoenix would refloat; they had come aboard briefly to jury-rig a rudder of sorts but otherwise lodged ashore, many of them in the town jail. The remaining hands had either been paid off or had joined other Shaw & Eggar vessels that happened to be in eastern coastal ports at that time. In such confusion, it was understandable that people would be more interested in their own arrangements than in the fate of yet another surplus female from the oul' ountry - even "a fate worse than death," as the saying had it. Teresa herself had, of course, kept well out of sight during the repairs to the rudder.

To Frank it seemed a fate as far removed from death as could be imagined. Time and again he told Teresa she had transformed his life. And Boris himself had commented to her well out of Troy's hearing, to be sure that he'd never seen the Cap'n so altered. -

"D'you know," Frank said to her on the night before they were to try to refloat the ship, "there has never been a week in my life when I literally had nothing to do but sit tight and wait."

"Ten days," she corrected him.