I was tired and cold, but before going below I paddled the dinghy around Stormchild’s hull to inspect her for bullet damage. There were some holes in her stern and some long shining scratches on her flanks, but otherwise our escape had been miraculously unscathed. I painted the damage over with white paint, because steel rusts with an appalling swiftness if it is not protected from the salt air, then I went below to find that our guest was now fully dressed in a pair of my trousers and one of David’s thick sweaters. She was also weeping hysterically; her thin shoulders heaving and her breath gulping as she huddled on the cabin floor beside the starboard sofa.
“Has she said anything?” I asked.
“Not a word, Tim! Not a whimper!”
David had been unsettled by the girl’s tears, so, to relieve him, I gave him the rifle and told him to go topside and keep watch.
“You’ll get no sense out of her,” he warned me.
“Go,” I said, “just go.”
He went, and I sat down beside our guest to discover just what she might know about my daughter.
The girl, when I crouched beside her on the diesel-reeking carpet, flinched away as if she thought I was going to hit her. “It’s all right,” I crooned, “it’s all right. I’m not going to hurt you. We’re friends, it’s all right.”
She made a noise halfway between a choke and a sob, but she calmed somewhat as I droned on as softly and reassuringly as I could. She was a dark-eyed, black-haired girl, who, I guessed, had once been pretty, but now that prettiness had soured into a narrow, hurt face with sallow skin against which her sunken eyes were so big and dark they looked like bruises. Her hair hung lank. Her teeth looked caried and in desperate need of cleaning. Her bare ankles, protruding from the legs of my thick flannel trousers, showed horrid patches of open sores where the steel shackles had abraded her skin.
“What’s your name?” I asked her.
She opened her mouth, but only succeeded in making another of the pathetic grizzling sounds.
I raised a hand to stroke her hair, but she immediately flinched away and made another terrified noise. “I’m not going to hit you,” I said, “it’s all right,” and I put my hand very gently on her shoulder and pulled her toward me, and, after a moment’s initial resistance, she fell against me and began to sob with huge racking heaves of her thin shoulders. I stroked her long hair, which was sticky with seawater, and kept asking for her name, but she made no response and I began to suspect that she spoke no English, and then, more alarmingly, I feared that she had somehow lost her tongue or vocal chords and could only make the pathetic glottal noises that intermittently punctuated her sobs.
I stroked and soothed her for a full ten minutes before she startled me by suddenly finding her voice. And when she did manage to speak, she did so with an abrupt and astonishing clarity. “Berenice,” she said. “My name’s Berenice.”
“Berenice.” I repeated the name, then remembered that Jackie Potten’s friend had been called Berenice Tetterman, and I softly pushed the girl away from me so that I could look into her bruised eyes. “You’re Berenice Tetterman,” I said, “and you come from Kalamazoo in Michigan. I know your friend, Jackie. She’s been looking for you. So has your mother.”
My words only provoked another flood of tears, but mixed in with the sobs were enough words to confirm that our tattered fugitive was indeed Berenice Tetterman. She told me how guilty she felt about everything, and how she thought her mother might be dead, so I kept repeating that everything was all right now, that she was safe and her mother was alive. Berenice clung with dirty, chipped nails to my sweater, her face buried somewhere in my chest, and slowly, slowly calmed again. She even managed to blurt out a question that seemed immensely important to her. “Are either of you ill?”
“No, of course we’re not,” I said in the tone one would use to dismiss a child’s ridiculous fantasy of gremlins under the bed or ogres in the night garden.
She pulled away to look into my face. “You promise?”
“Cross my heart and hope to die,” I said very solemnly, “we’re both quite well.”
“Because he says that people are dying everywhere. He says the AIDS virus is like the Black Death.” Berenice’s eyes had widened into terror as she spoke, and then she began to cry once more, but this time without the awful animal intensity that had made her earlier sobbing so distressing. These new tears were ones of exhaustion and sadness, but no longer of despair.
David dropped down the companionway. “All quiet outside,” he reported.
“I can’t believe they’ll find us in this cove,” I said, “but I reckon we should keep watch through the night, don’t you?”
He nodded. “I’ll keep watch until midnight, you until four, then me again?”
“Sure.” I was stroking Berenice Tetterman’s tangled and salt-ridden hair. “Has she eaten?” I asked David.
“She had some toast and coffee.”
“Why don’t you make us all some soup?” I suggested.
David switched on the lights in the galley while I went on stroking Berenice’s hair, and slowly, so very slowly, drew her story out from the thickets of her terror.
Her first fear had been the risk of catching the awful contagion with which Caspar von Rellsteb had terrified his followers. He had somehow persuaded Berenice and the others in the settlement that the outside world had been so stricken with the AIDS virus that normal life in so-called civilization had become impossible. He had persuaded his disciples that their only safety lay in clinging to his barren island. He had succeeded in using the fear of AIDS as a superbly effective means of control; so effective that, even now, faced with our robust denial of von Rellsteb’s terror stories, Berenice half suspected we were deceiving her.
David found a news magazine that had been jammed into a drawer to stop the cutlery rattling. “Look through that,” he told her. “I think you’ll see the world is still fairly normal.”
She leafed through the stained, damp pages, which told of wars and hostages and terrorism, but not of a worldwide plague as awful as those that had decimated medieval Europe. Slowly her look of fear was replaced by one of puzzlement. “We never see magazines or newspapers,” she explained, “because Caspar won’t let us. He says we mustn’t contaminate ourselves with things from outside. We have to stay pure, because we’re going to change the world.” She was crying very softly again. “Some of us wanted to leave a long time ago, when we first came here, but he wouldn’t allow us. One girl tried, and she died, then the AIDS came outside….”
“Who died?” I interrupted her. “What girl died?”
Berenice was puzzled by the swiftness and intensity of my question. “She was called Susan.”
“Do you know Nicole Blackburn?” I asked anxiously.
Berenice nodded, but said nothing.
“Was Nicole at the settlement today?” I asked. Berenice shook her head, but again said nothing, and I sensed that the urgency of my questions was somehow frightening her, so I made myself sound calm and reassuring again. “I’m Nicole’s father,” I explained, “and I’ve come looking for her. Do you know where she is?”
Berenice seemed scared of answering. “She’d be at the mine, if she was anywhere,” she finally said, then launched herself into a long and involved explanation about how she and the others were not really allowed to visit the mine, “although I went there once,” she added, “when they wanted us to clean off a boat. It isn’t really a mine at all,” she explained lamely, “only a limestone quarry with a few shafts, but there are some old buildings there as well.”