Chapter Twenty-Four
Wearing Paul’s coat, clutching his sword and his handwritten music of Debussy’s “Claire De Lune,” Ravenna became a senseless creature as James helped her down into the pinnace.
Taking her on his lap, he tried to console her. She felt his arms around her, heard his whispering in her hair, and yet there seemed nothing so much in his comforting as his own self-absorption, that strange, uncertain tremble to James’s voice. Ravenna couldn’t bear it. She stared into the night, and her thoughts became a clutter of useless repetition to tune him out, begging no one in particular, Please say it’s not true, please let him be alive.
A group of native women were waiting on the beach, and after James had greeted them and with simple gestures arranged for Sarah to be led to the village, he lifted Ravenna from the bow. Setting her feet above the waterline, he spoke softly; it was some baloney about how everything would be fine, and hearing it, coming to her senses at last, Ravenna found the voice to ask him the question.
“Please,” she said, and her words faltered when she met his gaze, “James, tell me what happened…what happened to my…”
She tried to stifle that horrible dread deep in her heart, that unfathomable pain, and when she lapsed into tears, James held her up, spoke to her as if she were a child. “Let me take you to the village, Love. Then I’ll tell you everything that he—”
“No!” Clutching his arm fiercely, Ravenna brushed aside her tears. “No, I want you to tell me now.”
James didn’t answer.
“Look,” she said, gathering her wits, “tell me what happened. He was…he was shot, wasn’t he?”
James looked down at the stones, the salt water lapping at his boots, and then up to the pinnace as the men shoved off and started the slow rowing back to Discovery. “Vancouver is to blame,” he said quietly. “He’s the one who sent us up that river, and if we’d only had the sense to depart his authority—”
“This river?” she asked.
“Two miles distant, on the southern bank, but—”
“Then there lies his body,” and pulling away before he could stop her, Ravenna ran headlong up the beach.
She heard James come after her. She didn’t care. Rushing over the rocks, her only wish to follow Paul even into death on the same expanse of tidal shore, she threw herself forward up the river’s bed blindly, and with all the will she had so that she barely even heard James’s pleas behind her. “You won’t find him! They’ve dragged him into the forest, I’ve already searched—”
Dragged him into the forest.
Suddenly she heard Paul saying those words, the fear thick in his voice as the last strains of Beethoven echoed through the house. I tried to call you, but I couldn’t make a sound. All I could do was watch you go on up the river.
With the memory of that night taking hold in her thoughts, Ravenna slowed her flight; it was just enough for James to catch her from behind.
“You have to believe me,” he said, seizing her waist. “If I could tell you otherwise, I’d give my life to do it, but he’s gone, Love. They’ve—”
“Was he alive?” Ravenna calmed her struggle a little. “When they took him, was he still alive?”
“I couldn’t reload fast enough! There’d lay before you a heap of savages, if only I’d had my—”
“Did you see him die?”
“Ravenna, it had to be fatal, as much blood as he lost on those banks. He couldn’t have possibly—”
“Did you see him die?”
Guilt tore at James’s expression. “No, but surely—”
That was all she needed to hear. In an instant, she was wrestling against him, crying out when he held her fast. “No, Love,” he told her sternly, fighting to hold her, “he’d have wanted you safe with me, so that nothing more could—”
“Don’t you understand? He’s alive!” She felt the tears streaming down, and still she went on doggedly, “James, he’s there. He’s waiting for us. We’ve got to save him, we have to save him—”
Already James was shaking his head. “No, Love, he’s found mercy in God and we’re powerless to change that.”
Yet even with his face so filled with conviction, all Ravenna could think of was Paul’s dream, his whispering in the dark, my Mary of the river…
With a tremendous shove, she broke out of James’s hands. Beach soaked by the tide loosened beneath her shoes as she willed herself forward, traced the river’s course, paying no mind to anything but the color of boulders, searching the banks for the stain of his blood. She knew unquestioningly he was on that river. Paul could see her; his dream had given her that much at least, and if only she knew where to pick up the trail.