A Safe Harbour (3 page)
Authors: Benita Brown
Tags: #Technology & Engineering, #Sagas, #Fisheries & Aquaculture, #Fiction
Kate turned to look up towards Bank Top. A group of villagers stood in line gazing down at the scene below. It was too dark now to make them out individually but Kate could see the women’s skirts fluttering as the wind began to gust. Some of the men, not engaged in the search, stood with their womenfolk, wanting to see the outcome but not wanting to intrude. Many of those silent watchers would have been guests at my wedding, Kate thought.
‘Here, lads, over here!’ The words carried clearly to the shore on the strengthening wind.
Mary Linton gripped her arm and Kate turned and strained to peer across the water. Her elder brother, William, had hooked something and he was leaning over as he held his burden against the side of the coble. He was waiting for assistance. Already the other crews were beginning to row towards him.
Soon all the cobles were huddled together, nudging and bumping against each other in the swell, the light from the fire-pans illuminating the sea around them. William and Thomas heaved together and a dark shape rose from the water. The small boat rocked violently as the brothers dragged their burden aboard.
‘Oh dear God . . . dear God.’ Kate sank to her knees in the wet sand.
She heard someone shout, ‘Over here . . . here’s the other one!’
Holding her head in her hands she began to cry.
Kate followed the sombre procession from the water’s edge. The men tried to maintain their dignity but the bodies were made heavier by the water and those carrying them stumbled now and then in the soft sand. They laid them on the ramp that led up to the lifeboat house.
Jos and Barty looked peaceful in death. Jos’s eyes were open and his mother reached down and closed them gently. Then she took off her shawl and laid it over her son’s body, covering his face. His father and brother watched silently, approving her gesture. Kate stood beside her, helpless. There was nothing she could do for the man she had been about to marry. A little further up the ramp Barty’s father, a widower, stood by his only son’s body with a look of blank resignation on his face.
After a while the men came with a cart and took Jos and Barty up the bank. They were going home for the last time. Jos’s family walked behind the cart. The way they clung together excluded her.
‘Kate? Are you coming?’ her mother’s voice called through the darkness.
‘Not yet. I need to be on my own.’
Nan didn’t try to persuade her. ‘Don’t stay too long,’ she said, then she set off up the bank after the others leaving Kate on the now deserted beach.
How quiet it was. Just the lapping of the waves on the shore and then the drag back across the shingle. Up in the village warm lights shone from cottage windows. Kate turned to look at the beached cobles. It wouldn’t be long before the men returned, trudging down the bank in their heavy sea boots and oilskins. Their wives and children would come with them, helping to carry the fishing gear, the nets, the food, the water bottles.
The crew of each coble would push their boat on wheeled bogies into the water. Then they would row the boats out beyond the breakwater before hoisting the sails, which would flutter briefly before filling with wind and thrusting the bows of the cobles into the heavy open sea. Soon, all that would be seen on the far horizon would be a cluster of tiny specks of light coming from the fire-pans. The men would harvest the fishing grounds as they had for centuries. But Jos would not be with them. Jos would never go fishing again. She was waiting here in vain.
The forlorn screech of a herring gull roused Kate from her reverie. She turned away from the sea and made her way, slowly, up to Bank Top.
Chapter Two
At sunrise Kate was back on the shore.
She had not slept. She had been sitting by the fire in the cottage when her older brother William had come home from the grim task of taking the bodies of the two young men to the lifeboat house. There they would stay until daylight, when the undertaker would be called. Kate’s father, who had taken no part in the recovery, had already left to prepare the coble for the night’s fishing and Thomas had returned to the beach to help him. Kate’s mother had been seeing to the old woman, feeding her a bowl of broth one slow spoon at a time.
‘Kate, lass . . .’
She looked up mutely to see William’s handsome face drawn and grey. His ashen features and the way he shook his head, almost in disbelief, sharpened her grief. She rose and moved towards him.
‘Why, William? Why?’
‘Whisht, lass,’ he said with a glance over his shoulder towards the bed where their mother was tending to Sarah. Nan nodded gravely in their direction and continued with her task. William motioned for Kate to sit again and drawing up a chair sat beside her. He took both her hands in his.
‘I’ll tell you what I’ve learned from Constable Darling,’ he said quietly. ‘I don’t want you to hear it from others. It seems the two of them had a drink or two.’
‘Jos told me they were going to talk about the wedding.’ Kate felt her voice break and she paused a while before she asked, ‘Did they drink too much, is that it? Were they too drunk to know what they were doing? But why would they put to sea?’
‘No.’ William shook his head. ‘They weren’t mortal. It seems they drank just enough to make them merry. They must have decided to walk it off. They went up to Marden farm. They . . . they stole some apples.’
‘Stole apples!’
‘Aye, Farmer Bains saw them from his window. They’d climbed over the orchard wall and they’d found an old sack. They were gathering up the apples that had fallen too soon. They were laughing and pushing each other like two big bairns and it was only when one of them fell against a tree that Farmer Bains decided to chase them off before they did any harm. He came out hollering at them but, of course, the lads outran him.’
‘So why did they put to sea?’
William gripped her hands more tightly. ‘That’s the tragedy of it. Mr Bains says he’ll regret all his life what he said next.’
‘What? What did he say?’
‘He yelled after them that he’d get Constable Darling to arrest them and lock them up.’
‘But they must have known he wouldn’t do that – not for the sake of a sackful of unripe apples!’
‘If they’d been sober they would have known that. A tongue-lashing from Farmer Bains or Constable Darling would have been the most they’d have to bear.’
‘Oh, Jos, Jos . . .’ Kate said. ‘It would be him that decided to launch the coble, wouldn’t it? Where Jos led Barty followed.’
‘Likely,’ her brother said.
‘But what happened out there?’
‘Some bairns who were playing on the beach watched them. They saw them drop anchor outside the harbour.’
‘What were they doing?’
‘Sleeping it off is my guess. And they must have been asleep when the tide came in.’
‘Oh, no . . .’
‘With the anchor down, caught on a rock, the other lads think, the tide swamped the coble and dragged it down. I doubt if either of them could swim; not many of the fishermen can. And God knows if they woke up before—’
‘Don’t!’ Kate said. And then, ‘How could he? How could Jos leave me like this for the sake of a sackful of apples?’
She rose to her feet angrily, not knowing what to do or where to go. Her brother stood and caught her, and held her in his arms until her grief and anger had subsided.
‘Kate, I’ve got to go,’ he said. ‘Our da and Thomas are waiting for me. But you know how sorry I am, don’t you?’
She nodded. Nan had come up behind them. The old woman was sleeping. ‘Go now, William,’ their mother said. ‘I’ll look after her.’
Nan gave Kate a bowl of broth and Kate did her best to eat it. They talked quietly about the story William had told until, still not making sense of it all, Kate persuaded her mother to go to bed. She would sit by the fire, she had said.
But she had not been able to take comfort from its warmth. There was no warmth in the world that could compensate for the loss of all her hopes and dreams. She rose, pulling her shawl around her shoulders, and crept quietly out of the cottage.
A light sea mist hung over the harbour, muffling all sound and enclosing her in her world of grief. She stood in the wave-ridged sand at the shoreline, the salt air cooling her tear-stained face and the dampness making her long russet hair cling to her neck in coiled tendrils.
Hugging her shawl around her body, Kate looked out towards the horizon to where the cobles rolled and pitched on the swell, their square red-brown sails appearing and disappearing in swirls of ghostly vapour. Despite the tragedy of the day before, the men of the village had gone out not long after midnight. They had their livings to earn and would be back for the morning fish auction on the beach.
The pale disc of the sun, still low over the sea, grew warmer and the mist began to lift. As the sky cleared the cries of the gulls grew more shrill. They spread their wings and rode the currents of air above the bay, their screams piercing the air. Kate put her hands over her ears. The old superstition that seabirds were the souls of drowned sailors and fishermen sprang into her mind. Had they come to greet poor Jos and Barty? Or were they scolding them for losing their lives in such a hare-brained escapade?
Suddenly a wave sped across the shore towards her. The whooshing sound roused her from her unhappy musings and she stepped back, but not before two or three rounded stones, tumbling in the lacy foam, washed up against her feet. She looked down and her eyes widened. The water retreated but the gifts it had brought stayed. And then another wave brought more. And she saw that they were not stones at all.
Kate looked out across the water. Under the mist trails, glistening fragments of light sparkled on the ever-shifting surface of the sea. And bobbing up and down as they drifted towards her were the apples that Jos had stolen. He’d meant them for her. As if in a dream, Kate sank down on to the wet sand and began to gather them up.
Jane Harrison and her mother sat at the table in the cosy, well-furnished room behind her father’s workshop. Mr Harrison was a shoemaker and cobbler and he had prospered. And although, when she’d been small, Jane had run barefoot with the other village children it was not because, like many of them, she could not afford a pair of shoes. In fact she had the best her father’s skill could provide and that was why her mother allowed her to take them off when she went to play on the shore. The cobbler’s wife was sensible enough not to want the shoes ruined with salt water just for the sake of pride.
But now neither Jane nor her mother liked to dwell on those childhood days. Jane had done so much better than most of the other girls who had been in her class at school. In her mother’s eyes Jane had risen so far above the village lasses that she was a better class of person altogether, and Jane would not have argued with that. Save for Kate. There was something about Kate Lawson, something indefinable, that defied anyone to try to put her in her place.
Jane had caught the first morning train home from Newcastle where she worked as a lady’s maid in a big house in Jesmond. She always did this on her day off, even though it meant rising long before even the skivvy and the kitchen maid whose job it was to get the kitchen range going and set the table for the staff’s breakfast. Jane preferred to spend as much time as possible at home. Her mother spoiled her. She would make breakfast for her the minute she arrived, but today Jane couldn’t face the plate of poached eggs and bacon. She stared at her mother, horrified by what she had just heard.
‘Drowned? Jos drowned?’ she said.
‘Aye, pet. And Barty Lisle, too.’ Her mother sighed. ‘And all for the sake of a few apples.’
‘I don’t understand.’ Jane was both shocked and bewildered.
After hearing her mother tell the tale, she shook her head. Her friend Kate’s sweetheart had made a habit of getting into mischief ever since he’d been a small boy. It had been harmless fun most of the time, although he had frequently strained Jane’s sense of humour. She’d often wondered what Kate had thought about it, but then, Kate would never have criticized Jos.
‘I must go to her.’
‘Yes, I know you must. But you haven’t eaten anything. Will you at least have a cup of tea? I’ll sit and have one with you.’
Jane allowed her mother to fuss a little. In truth she was glad to stay awhile in the comfort of the parlour while she adjusted to the terrible situation. She wasn’t sure yet what she would say to Kate, her oldest friend. She took a sip of her tea and smiled wanly at her mother.
‘I was going to fit the dress today,’ she said. ‘Make the last adjustments.’
The two women stared at each other, their expressions solemn. ‘Poor Kate,’ Florence Harrison said. ‘She’d have made such a bonny bride.’
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