Storm Tide

The Bennett Island Series

An Answer in the Tide

Summer of the Osprey

Day Before Winter

Tide Trilogy

High Tide at Noon

The Storm Tide

Ebbing Tide

Lover's Trilogy

Dawning of the Day

The Seasons Hereafter

Strawberries in the Sea

Book II of the Tide Trilogy

Elisabeth Ogilvie

Camden, Maine

To my brothers, my friends, and all the other boys in the armed forces who read and liked
High Tide at Noon

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About the Author

T
HE LAND ASTERN WAS A FADING DARK LINE
; the land over the bow gleamed in the end of sunset. Above the bright rocks the spruces had a curious rich green, massed thickly against the paling east. The wake of the boat fanned and foamed creamily back toward the mainland. But for the woman who stood in the bow, there was no mainland. There was only the Island which grew steadily nearer, out of the darkening sea.

The forty-foot seiner, trim and rakish in spite of her sturdiness, beat her swift way out of the west. The competent pulse of her engine throbbed through the woman's feet and was confused with the racing tempo of her blood. Outwardly she was a still, calm figure, standing in the bow with her back to the two men aft by the wheel; her head lifted high on the slim tanned strength of her neck, her dark eyes forever watching the Island, her mouth composed above the firm chin. But in her topcoat pockets her palms were wet. Her throat kept drying, so she must swallow.

She was going home. She said it to herself, her lips moving: “I'm going home. I'm going home. Where's Joanna these days? they'll ask down at the sardine factory. Oh, didn't you know? Joanna's gone home.
For good
.”

She laughed aloud and turned around. The two men at the wheel were deep in conversation, and Joanna studied them for a moment before they noticed her. Her oldest brother, Charles, the captain of
The Four Brothers
, was laughing at something, and the sound of his laughter carried to her. He shoved his cap back on his black head, and against the glowing western sky his profile was strong and hawklike.

She remembered how he had spoken to her just before the wedding in the afternoon—just a few hours ago, but it seemed as if it must have been at least a week ago.

“I never thought I'd be giving my sister away in marriage,” he'd told her, as they waited in the dining room of his house in Pruitt's Harbor. “But I want to tell you, Jo, I never felt so good, and so proud, about anything, as seeing you marrying Nils Sorensen.”

They'd all felt like that, the whole family. Her mother and all the brothers . . .
It's what they always wanted me to do
, Joanna thought without rancor.
They love Nils and trust him
. . . . Her dark gaze moved to the other man by the wheel.

Not so tall as Charles, but compactly and neatly built, Nils Sorensen stood with his hand on the wheel. He wore gray tweed trousers and a blue pullover sweater, his shirt collar was very white against his sunburnt neck. Joanna tried to look impersonally at this man who had been her friend all her life, who was now her husband.

His hair is the color of wheat
, she thought.
His eyes are as blue as the wild flag in the marsh. Nothing ever bothers him, and he's so clean it's refreshing just to look at him
.

Then, abruptly, she couldn't be impersonal. It was when Nils caught her glance, and smiled down the length of the boat at her. She lifted her hand in greeting, and then turned back. The Island had come much closer. It seemed as if she could smell the warm resinous breath of spruce which all day had dreamed in peaceful loneliness under a September sun.

The Four Brothers
slipped past the wooded western end of the nearer, larger island, Brigport; the rocky shore flung back the engine's echo, and a late-flying gull drifted past the masthead on strongly beating wings. The sun had dropped quite suddenly into the sea, and in the shadow of the islands the water was dark, the buoys bobbing in the evening chop were restless black dots; in daylight they would have been red and white and orange and yellow and blue.

Joanna thought she could feel her heart speed up as the boat passed the red spar buoy that marked the Outer Breaker, and headed for the southwest point of Bennett's Island. They were avoiding the harbor; Charles would go directly around to Goose Cove, and unload on the small wharf Nils had built out over the rocks during the preceding months when he had lived alone on the Island.

In the shadow of the high rocky shore, and the woods rising above it, the boat passed coves where Joanna had once played, following her brothers on their long expeditions after wood, and in their involved games of pirates and Indians where they'd boiled periwinkles in a can over a driftwood fire, and stormed the walls of rock to capture Arabs, early settlers, and hostile natives of the unnamed South Sea islands on which they were always being washed up as castaways.

“Excited?” said Nils' low voice beside her.

“Why wouldn't I be?” She slipped her arm through his. “Look, as soon as we get around to Schooner Head, well see the house. Nils—”

He looked at her, waiting.

“I wish Father could know the Island wasn't going to be alone any more.” She felt to her horror an unsteadiness in her chin.

“He knows,” said Nils. She accepted the assurance in his voice, and began once more to watch for the house.

It came at last. High on its place between two coves, its western windows fired with the sunset, it stood waiting. The boat headed into the shadowed tranquillity of Goose Cove, darkened now by the long high rocky point on one side, and the wall of spruce woods on the other; a massive defense that stretched to the very south-west tip of the Island, around which
The Four Brothers
had just come. The curve of beach glimmered lavender-white.

The engine stopped abruptly, and there was only the swift rushing of water away from the sides of the boat, as she cut toward the wharf, to break the hush. Joanna's arm tightened in Nils'. She was grateful that he said no word.

She walked alone up to the house. Behind her Nils and Charles unloaded supplies and new trap stuff from the boat, their normal voices sounding crisp and clear in the stillness.

In the little sloping field between the house and Goose Cove, the grass was cool and damp around her ankles; she stepped carefully to avoid the ripening cranberries in the boggy spots. Great drifts of wild asters, chalky-pale in the evening light from which all color had been drawn, brushed her skirt. Her happiness was no wild, exultant thing, but rather it was so deeply rooted in her that it could hardly be called happiness. The word was too ephemeral, and this was something that would never end; she knew it with a certainty that had not been hers for a long time.

She drew long breaths of the cool air, and the last sleepy twitterings from the woods held a peculiar enchantment for her ears. The birds had never sounded like that on the mainland, nor had there been woods like these. She was glad she could walk up to the house alone.

In the kitchen she lit a lamp, and looked around at the room. The last time she had seen it, it had been an empty room full of ghosts; and now, miraculously, it was a room where people lived. Nils had done it all. He had painted the walls the exact tender aquamarine she wanted, he had painted and polished the stove, set an array of lamps with shining chimneys on the lamp shelf, and laid on the floor the braided rugs Donna had sent out; their muted, faded colors glowed softly in the lamplight. The woodbox was full, the stovelengths stacked with Nils' mathematical precision. On an impulse Joanna lifted a stove lid, and then smiled; the kindling was ready to be lighted.