At last, exhausted, we lay back, breathing deeply and watching the passing clouds with their impenetrable dark gulfs. When occasional streaks of gold broke through, the sun would tantalize us with glimpses of hidden treasures. Then the clouds thickened again and all the colours in the surrounding hills fell an octave. The heather and even the little moor flowers seemed almost black.
Then for a few more seconds the sun burst completely through and I turned to Miriam Galt lying there beside me. She was like some ancient priestess, her face, her whole body sheathed in molten gold.
When the clouds blotted out the sun again, she was human. At that moment I felt brave enough to tell her I loved her. I hoped she’d tell me she loved me, too.
After a while she did speak, but it wasn’t to say what I wanted so much to hear. With a sigh she invited me to come next day, for the very first time, to her home — the house amongst the windbreak of evergreens.
5
The rows of evergreens that offered the house protection against the weather also helped safeguard the only deciduous tree — a wide but not very tall oak which stood in the middle of a sizable front lawn. The house was of a traditional two-storey rectangular structure, built with granite blocks. On either side of the front door were two symmetrical windows with dark curtains. The second floor had three curtained windows, one of them above the door. Ivy clung to the walls around them. Engraved on the lintel of the door was the formal name of the house:
DUNCAIRN MANOR
1885
Miriam Galt, who’d walked with me from our usual meeting place at the rock, had been unusually quiet. She now opened the heavy wooden door, we went inside, and she closed it gently behind us. From the hallway, she took me into a living room with the high wainscoting of the previous century and a lot of solid-looking mahogany furniture. A stone fireplace with no fire lit in it took up almost one wall. The room seemed unchanged since the house was built.
“He’ll be in the library,” Miriam said. We approached another door which matched the wainscoting so well that it was scarcely noticeable. Just before we entered, she said softly, “Now remember, he’s not well.”
She tapped the door three times and opened it.
We went into a very gloomy room. It had just one window in the southern wall with green stained glass in place of curtains, so not much daylight got through. The walls were lined with bookcases, and on a table in the middle of the room lay what looked like a brass telescope. There was a floor lamp and a sofa near a fireplace in which a low fire had been lit — no doubt to ward off the high moorland dampness. The only ornament on the walls was a dim photograph over the mantel. Pervading the air was a smell like incense.
At first, no one else seemed to be in the room.
Then Miriam spoke.
“Father,” she said. “I want you to meet my friend, Harry.”
My eyes were now becoming accustomed to the gloom. What had seemed at first like a pile of clothing on the sofa by the fireplace took on the shape of a flimsy-looking man in black pyjamas. He had thin grey hair, a thin face, and sad eyes. The thing I’d taken for a floor lamp beside the sofa was actually a metal pole on wheels with a bottle of some transparent liquid hanging from a hook. A tube from the bottle was connected to his left arm. I could also see now that he had a striped cat beside him.
I went forward to shake his hand. The cat arched its back and hissed at me.
Miriam’s father got slowly to his feet but didn’t shake my hand. In fact, he even drew his hand back from mine. I didn’t really mind. In the poor light, the fingers protruding from the pyjama sleeve looked shrivelled and dark, as though charred by fire — or, worse, they might have been the legs of a big spider.
From what Miriam had told me of his past, I’d associated her father with a life of action, exploring mighty oceans and exotic lands with his fleet of ships. Instead he looked more like a wreck being swept helplessly towards the reef.
“We won’t disturb your rest,” Miriam said to him. “I just wanted you to meet Harry.”
He nodded his head to me and shrank back into the sofa beside his cat.
“Let’s go,” Miriam said.
As we were leaving, I noticed that the photograph over the mantel was of Miriam Galt herself.
“I’M SORRY,” she said when we were outside the room again. “Sometimes he’s more sociable. Today, he wasn’t in the mood.”
Now that I’d seen her father and the state he was in, she was less reluctant to talk about him. Apparently, she herself would often sit with him for hours without his noticing her. Sometimes he’d spend all day on that sofa dozing, only nibbling at the meals brought to him. He even slept there most nights rather than go to his bedroom upstairs. On some of those nights, if the sky was cloudless, he’d disconnect himself from his pole and go into the garden. There, with his old ship’s telescope, he’d spend hours studying the heavens.
Miriam seemed to find this behaviour disturbing. But I thought it was, to an extent, understandable from someone who’d spent a lot of time at sea and might be familiar with celestial navigation.
“Yes, and it’s true I’ve learned a lot from him about the positions and motion of the stars,” Miriam said. “But now the main reason he watches them is that he believes a message might be written there — something especially for him. He often tells me so.”
That certainly made him sound a little mad, in addition to his physical illness, whatever that was. Out of politeness, I said maybe he’d recover and things would turn out all right in the end.
“There’s no chance of that,” she said.
Her reply made me think Miriam Galt wasn’t an optimist.
“I’ll show you some of his treasures, if you like,” she said.
We went up the staircase to a large room on the second floor. The ceiling light wasn’t very strong, so Miriam drew back the window curtain. The floor was of plain wooden planks and clear of all furniture except for a number of glass display boxes you might find in a museum. A bookcase stood against the far wall. There was also a stand with some sort of ship’s clock on it. Apparently its bell rang every half hour, day and night — I’d heard its high-pitched sound through the ceiling when we were with her father.
“Some of the collection’s worth a look,” Miriam said. “His officers used to pick things up for him on their voyages.”
Indeed, a number of the items were out of the ordinary. One box held two shrunken human heads, male and female, with long grey hair, their eyelids and lips stitched up. A longer box near the window held a collection of stilettos, machetes, and parangs with brown stains on the blades that didn’t look like rust. Another box was full of a variety of scrimshaws made of whalebone and narwhal tusks. They were skilfully incised with the usual kinds of romantic seafaring images, but also with scenes of hangings from yardarms and knifings in taverns.
In the bookcase against the back wall, most of the books were in poor condition, their covers warped, the print almost illegible. Some of them were just the kinds of things you’d expect to find on a ship: A Young Sailor’s Introduction to Seafaring, and Tides and Currents in the Straits of Malacca, and A Guide to Knot Making, and Travels in the Melanesian Islands. The others were an assortment of mildewed books such as you might find in any library on shore.
“All of them are from ships that foundered without survivors,” said Miriam Galt. “He doesn’t read them, he just likes to have them. For him the important thing is the idea that the last person to read them had drowned.”