Page 156 of Dark Tides
“Rob!” she whispered, her voice echoing across the water.
In the darkness she could just make out a small craft, a punt for hunting wildfowl, slide into the deep channel and come towards her,a figure pushing it along the shallow channel. The prow grounded on her patch of dry land.
“Rob Reekie?” she asked.
“Are you Sarah?”
“Yes. I feel I should ask… Like a password.”
“Ask anything.”
“What’s our name for Wandering Haven?”
“Foulmire,” he said at once. “Foul for it stinks like a foul thing, and mire for you are trapped in it forever. And God knows why we miss it so much.” He reached out a warm hand and she took it and he pulled her on board. “You must be freezing,” he said. “Take my cape.” He swung it off his shoulders and around her. Sarah clutched it to herself.
“I’d have known you,” Rob said. “Though you’re grown. I would have known you for little Sarah.”
She looked at him, trying to trace her memory of him on his thin prison-pale face, her mother’s features on his gauntness.
“Where to?” Rob asked. “I thought you had a ship?”
“I hope I’ve got one waiting,” she said. “Off Sant’ Erasmo.”
“The Captain’ll never take me on, if he knows I’ve come from here.”
“He will,” she said. “It’s Captain Shore. He’s sweet on my ma.”
“On Alys?”
She nodded, still shivering as he pushed them off from the sandbank with the pole, and then started to move the punt, kneeling in the stern so they were low in the water and less visible in the moonlight.
“How did you get the boat?”
“Governor’s boat,” he said. “He lends it to me for fishing, and hunting. We don’t get the best food on the island, so he lets me fish in secret.”
“Could you be infected?” she asked.
“I think not,” he said. “We’ve only had a few fevers since I was sent there, and no plague at all. Please God, I’m clean. I’ve got no signs.”
Sarah said nothing more, watching this uncle that she had never known, looking into his square face and his brown hair, tracing the resemblance to her mother as he knelt up and poled the boat along.
“What will we do, if he doesn’t let us on board?” she asked, sharing her fear.
“You’ll go on board,” he said. “Back to England. And I’ll ask him to tow me, as far as he will, out of the lagoon, towards the mainland. You’ve given me hope. If I can get out of the lagoon, and out of rule of the Republic of Venice, I’ll get home somehow.”
They were silent as he poled them into the main channel and Sarah felt the flow of the water take them quickly away from the lazaretto.
“There it is!” she said as she saw the dark bulk of the ship in the darkness. “He’s waiting for me.”
Rob let the little craft nudge alongside the waiting ship and looked up. A rope ladder tumbled down to them and Captain Shore peered over the side. They could see the muzzle of a pistol before him.
“Who’s there?” he said, his voice a low rumble of anger.
“It’s me,” Sarah said, speaking through chattering teeth. “Captain Shore! It’s me! And I’ve got my uncle Rob. An Englishman, you know, and the brother of my ma—Alys Stoney.”
“Is he sick?”
“I’m not,” Rob said, standing in the rocking boat and lifting his face upwards. “See? No marks, no symptoms, and I’ve not been with anyone with plague. That I swear. There’s no disease on the island but a few fevers, and there’s been none since I was sent there. Let me on and I’ll go straight into a cabin and not come out for forty days.”
