When Aymer was out of earshot of the town, he started calling ‘Otto! Otto!’ and then ‘Uwip! Uwip!’ but only Whip responded. His trousers and the skirt of his coat were soon muddy from her front paws and his patience with the dog was exhausted. After an energetic, breathtaking half hour of walking at a speed more suited to a horse, Aymer slowed. He stopped calling out for Otto. He stopped expecting a reply. He didn’t even search the countryside for distant, single figures, or giant footprints, or wolf-like cries. He concentrated only on the path. Come what may, he told himself, he’d reach the Rock. And if the African was there? His plan was this: he’d bribe the Bowes to take him in, hide him till the Wednesday dawn, and then bring him — disguised in a dress and bonnet — to the quay at Wherrytown and the safety of the Tar. He’d give Otto a job at Hector Smith & Sons. The plan was not preposterous. He’d dress him well. He’d mould him into shape. Otto would learn to read, write, cypher, be a gentleman, and enjoy the status and emancipation that otherwise could flourish only in his dreams. If he was not at the Cradle Rock? What then? Aymer could do little more than leave the meal of bread and cheese, protected from the gulls by stones. That wasn’t much of a rescue. But at least Aymer wouldn’t have abandoned his freed man for a third cold night entirely without provisions. He must make some amends for the haste and carelessness of emancipating Otto without a scrap of food. Without a hat, a weathercoat or money. He wondered if there were a sign that he could leave, a simple warning that Otto would be hunted down and put back on the Belle unless he ran and ran and ran.
Of course, there was no sign of anybody at the Cradle Rock, not even fishermen at sea. Something else was odd, too, an absence from the scene. At first Aymer couldn’t say quite what. But then he saw the cabin lockers, the seamen’s chests, the double-barrelled cannon, the ship’s supplies, the stacks of timber partly covered in tarpaulins and left for safekeeping above the tideline amongst the salty foliage of the backshore dunes. There, too, were the cattle from Quebec herded in two gorse-fenced compounds. He remembered. That then was the oddity. The American ship had been removed. The sea was more remote without the Belle, as if now its only urgency was moon and tide. Two days before the Belle had seemed to be a solid fixture on its sandbar. More solid than the Cradle Rock.
Aymer climbed up to the rounded platform, found the spot that he had shared with Ralph Parkiss on the Sunday, put his back against the granite mass again and pushed. How had it ever moved? Its weight seemed anchored to the coast. A third Ice Age might move it from its pivot stone, but not a man alone, not Aymer, not a thousand Aymers. He might as well have put his back against the door of a great cathedral and hoped to shake the pigeons from its spire.
He called ‘Otto’. Just once. Whip turned and growled. But no one came to help him with the Rock. He went back up the narrow path onto the headland and sat down on the wooden bench where he had rested with Ralph Parkiss before they’d grappled — together — with the Cradle Rock. Ralph’s initials were freshly carved on the seat, the splintered wood still fleshy brown and free of timber mould. Aymer put the cheese, the bread, the pilchards on the seat where they couldn’t be missed. He covered them with the napkin and weighed the corners down with stones. The walk had made him hungry, and thirsty too. He lifted up the napkin edge and broke off just an elbow of the bread and one small whang of cheese. The gulls came down to watch him eat. It wasn’t yet one o’clock. There was no hurry to return. He took a sharp stone and scratched a careless A.H.S. in the wood. He added Otto’s name beneath. And then he circled Ralph’s carving with a heart, and added Miggy’s initials, M.B., below the deeper, more painstaking R and P.
He walked down to Dry Manston beach, nosed amongst the loose equipment from the Belle, walked to the water’s edge to see what kelps and carcasses there were, threw scraps of broken timber for the dog. He watched the dunes and the path beyond for anybody passing by. At last he was so cold and thirsty that he found the courage he’d been waiting for. He walked up past the Bowes’ kelping pit, along the track where Miggy had refused to shake his hand, until he reached their cottage yard. He didn’t have to knock at the door. The two Bowe mongrels leaped up on their ropes and barked. Whip’s tail was uncontrolled. The Bowes had returned from pilcharding, it seemed. Thank God for that. The curtain cloth was pulled back and Miggy’s face was pressed against the bottle-glass, her red kerchief refracted in a dozen glassy crescents, her cold face flushed with tears. Aymer raised his hat. He mouthed, ‘Good morning, Miss Bowe.’ She did not move. Her mother opened the door.
Why had he come? He didn’t know how to explain except to say, rather lamely, ‘I was passing by, and thought I might impose on you.’ Again he had the only chair, but on this Tuesday there wasn’t any warm mahogany to drink, nor any fire, nor any bending flattery of light except the thin, cold, steady light of day which came in through the window and spread its square and chilling carpet on the earth floor. Should he, perhaps, explain he had the influenza and was merely seeking some respite from the weather? Or that he hoped to gain permission to sketch their cottage at some later date? Or tell the truth, that he was looking for the African, the African that in a day would be brought back as a slave? Was that the truth? Had Otto brought him to this door, this dark room? Or was it that he simply liked it there, its smell of fish and half-dried clothes, its lack of ornament, its womanly silence, its calm?
He watched the women’s silhouettes as they made room for him and cleared some floor space for his legs. They gave him water flavoured with a little mint, and bread with beef. Rosie Bowe sat in the corner on a box. Miggy went beyond the sacking curtain, lay down on the box-bed and soon was talking to herself, like young girls do when they are full of hope and tears. Aymer’s eyes were soon accustomed to the light, and he could see the room more clearly and just pick out on the chimney breast the few embroidered lines from Jeremiah. ‘Weep sore for him that goeth away …’ he began to read out loud, and meant to say something about Otto. But Rosie Bowe interrupted him. ‘Not that!’ she said, and stood to turn the embroidery around, so that the letters were reversed and all the working threads revealed.
‘She says she’s going to America.’ Rosie pointed to the bed. ‘She says she’s going to be with that boy Ralph.’
‘I am, Ma. Yes, I am.’
‘He hasn’t asked you yet?’
‘He will, though. He says that’s why he came here. So’s me and him could meet and be together.’
‘He din’t choose to come here, girl. He was brought here by the sea.’
‘That’s why the sea has brought him, then.’
‘You think that husbands get washed in by storms, is that it?’
‘I do think that. I do.’ She hadn’t thought it, up till then, in fact — but the image of her Ralph delivered to her in a storm was like a fairytale, and she the princess in her hut. ‘Why should I stay here any more?’ she said. ‘I’m seventeen. There’s Oxy Hobbs, she went away when she was only fifteen, and married since.’
‘She’s gone ten miles, that’s all.’
‘Well, Mary Dolly, then. She’s gone to London … That in’t ten miles.’
‘Gone to be a chambergirl and not to wed, and not gone to America …’
‘She don’t have Ralph, though, and I do. If he goes off without me, Ma, I’m going to drown myself from swimming after him.’
‘You’re talking wild and silly, Miggy Bowe.’