A fate worse than death—at last.
Edie poked the Linzertorte with one of those three-tined objects some people insist on calling a runcible spoon, and wondered hopefully if the filling might be poisoned. She inhaled carefully, and detected a scent of almonds: the infamous tell-tale of potassium cyanide—albeit also and more commonly the tell-tale of marzipan. Putting the mouthful to the test, she established that it was not poisoned, and grudgingly acknowledged that it was in fact pretty good. Morose and unwilling, she settled down to enjoy it as little as possible, her eye drawn at each bite to the image in the mirror: an old woman slowly and painstakingly partaking of one of the few pleasures left to her. Moist, narrow lips and wattled neck working. She would not attempt to gain access to the crime scene—if that was what it was. She would not meddle. When this wretchedly acceptable bit of pastry was over, she would return to her hotel and gather her things. She would go home and do… whatever single old women did.
Between mouthfuls, memory took her, fond and merciless. Donny Caspian, not dead—not then—and superb in himself, even if not Edie’s usual cup of tea.
The boat is secure, a long line running from the stern to the reef below, the anchor lodged comfortably in a rocky outcrop rather than a piece of brittle coral. Edie Banister, not yet twenty and with her wartime commission newly minted, most secret and unconventional, checks her mask and puts a wooden clothes peg on her nose, then rides the plumb weight all the way down. It feels rough in her hands, old and pitted; although she made it a bare two weeks ago, repeated impacts with the sea floor, and the boat, and the beach, have made it look ancient. This pleases her in a small way. Her plumb looks no different from Ancient Saul’s, and he’s a thousand years old if he’s a day and has been riding the same plumb since he melted it with his daddy before the turn of the century. Like everyone in his family, Saul Caspian dives for pearls. He will die underwater, he says. One day the sea will hold him, and he will go home.
The Caspians are pirates and lechers, but for all that they are powerfully, alarmingly devout.
Saul smiled at her this morning from his chair by the pier. All right, girly, you’re ready. The Hollow’s waitin’. When she came here, he told her she’d never ride the weight to Fender’s Hollow—too small, he said, too narrow, no legs to speak of and no chest. But Saul is an old mellow tree. He says that to everyone, secure in the knowledge the good ones will prove him wrong. His nephew Donny, barrel-chested and constructed entirely from some sort of essence of youthful maleness, is the same. Divers don’t like to be talkers. The Hollow’s waitin’. Edie nearly shouted in delight. Then she nearly fled. Fender’s Hollow is a long way down, and dangerous. It’s also the brass ring: if you can dive the Hollow, you can hold your head high anywhere there are divers, anywhere in the world. And you can—if you are Edie—undertake a particular task for your country. If, if, if.
Ba-boom. Edie’s heart gives its first audible beat since she let go of the boat and started the dive. The water around her is blue, not green. Green water is shallow water, up in the first yards of the sea. It hardly counts. Blue water is the body of the ocean. When you can ride the plumb to blue water, to the place where you can’t see the green, that’s a start.
Ba-boom. She dives, white limbs and red bikini. Edie is what they call a greyhound, which is a nice way of saying a stick insect or a garden rake. She waited bravely for the bosom fairy to arrive, to bring, along with the obvious, hips and pouting lips and bedroom eyes (which latter, Edie has observed, are associated almost exclusively with women possessed of the more notable sort of bust) and has realised at last that no such beneficence will be forthcoming. But here, it’s all good. No bust means no buoyancy, no hips means no drag. And Saul, bless him for a curmudgeon and an old stoat, was wrong about one thing: Edie has lungs to spare. Her whole chest is a compression tank, storing up the air and pressing it down to take in more. Edie Banister, a white arrow with red fletching, falling into the depths.
Ba… boom. Her heart is slowing. Good. Fender’s Hollow, like a basket of diamonds, spreads out beneath her. The line from the boat brushes her leg, and Edie flinches away. She wants no part of that line, not now. No desire to be tangled here, midway between the surface and the floor. She has a knife, sure, but who wants to test their own ability to saw through a rope underwater with dwindling reserves of oxygen? And maybe drop the knife, oh, yes, see life tumble off into the depths, winking like a firefly as you grey out and the drowning takes you. Mermaids and piskies in your eyes, come to our water world, oh yes.
Ba… boom. Fender’s Hollow is a cradle in the reef, a strange cup of white leaves and orange spires, one built on another on another over a dreadful abyss which turns black within an arm’s reach. Black water is a mystery. Oh, you can dive black water with modern equipment. You can take lights. But you haven’t seen it. Black water is like a shy shark, gone when you turn around, vanished when you shine a light on it. Black water is the water where the sun cannot go, shadowed and profound. The only people who see black water truly are the drowning men, fishers sucked under by the tide, careless oystermen and sailors on big ships shattered by the gales. Black water is, by definition, water you cannot travel. Or, cannot travel and return.
And there it is, like a wicked eye, peering out of the coral. She thought it was a wall or a wreck, but no, that’s it. The deep, in person.
Ba.… boom. Edie Banister, white fish girl. Her feet touch the coral. She sets the plumb on the rock next to the anchor, and begins to look around. Down here, somewhere, Saul has left her something. She has a minute, maybe two, to find it and bring it back. Nothing. Tick-tock, no time to be absent-minded. Focus. Where’s the geegaw? She’s almost sure it will be a sparkling thing: Saul is always trying to get her to accept gifts. Wear this on your chest, girly. Let a poor old man imagine he’s touched that skin. Almost, she snorts. Bad idea.
Coral and weed, and bright, bold fish. No geegaw.
Or—yes. There. Over by the hole, the eye of the deep. In fact… through it. Something sparkles, hanging in the current. She darts for it, disturbs it, juggles it in her hand and loses it. A cheap thing, made of polished glass, shells and copper wire. It falls away from her, and she dives after it. Catches it. And cannot turn back. There’s no space to turn. She must go down another two yards into the dark, then up and around. It’s no distance at all.
It’s the most terrifying thing she has ever done.
Kick, idiot. Kick, go down or drown.
She kicks.
Ba-boom. Ba-boom. That’s fear. Ignore it. She wants to breathe to slow her heart. She wants her heart to slow so that she doesn’t have to breathe. The coral is above her back, and now she can use her arms. Below her is the abyss, bottomless and cold, and she can feel it reaching for her. Tendrils of current snag at her feet—but now she’s moving up and away, her face to the green water above. The water is filled with shadows, a school of fish? Or just spots in her eyes from the time without air? She doesn’t know. She’s breathing out, rising, grasping for the surface, bursting through the mutinous, flexible ceiling. She has her hands in the air but you can’t breathe through your fingers, can’t pull yourself up on air. Her head breaks through, and immediately she slams to one side. The sky’s in the wrong place. She’s turning over—when the Hell did the weather come up? The sky is what they call gurly, meaning bad things: a Scottish word.